CORRESPONDENCE.

The Editorial Board of the Canadian Bar Association does not hold itself responsible for the opinions of Correspondents. Contributions to this department of the REVIEW will be published only over the genuine names of the writers.

GLAMIS OR CAWDOR-WHICH?

Editor Canadian Bar Review:

Sir,-Your correspondent, Mr. Wears, says that, in stating that Shakespeare has made Glamis Castle, in Forfarshire, Scotland, the scene of one of his greatest tragedies, I “have drawn a conclusion for which there does not seem to be any justification." Mr. Wears may be right, but at least I sin in fairly good company. Nelson's Encyclopædia, in an article on Glamis,

says:

"In the parish is Glamis Castle, the seat of the Earl of Strathmore. Shakespeare associates the thanage of Glamis with Macbeth by the murder of Malcolm II. in the castle (1034).”

It is true that, according to the Encyclopædia Britannica, Cawdor Castle was the scene, according to tradition which Shakespeare has perpetuated, of the murder of King Duncan by Macbeth, Thane of Cawdor, in 1040," but it is difficult to see what ground there is for this statement. At the opening of the play Macbeth is thane of Glamis and is created thane of Cawdor only on the former thane being condemned to death for treason in the second scene of Act 1. In scene 5 of the same Act Lady Macbeth is reading a letter from her husband announcing his advancement, an attendant enters to inform her that "The King comes here to-night," and on his heels Macbeth himself appears. Obviously Shakespeare is not perpetuating a tradition that the murder took place at Cawdor Castle. makes the scene of the tragedy Macbeth's own home, and "the thaneship of Glamis was the ancient inheritance of Macbeth's family. The castle where they lived is still standing; and was in late years the residence of the Earl of Strathmore." (Cassell's Illustrated Shakespeare, edited by Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke).

He

Shakespeare, it is true, makes Inverness the place of Macbeth's residence. Inverness-a room in Macbeth's castle is the heading over Act 1, scene 5; but Shakespeare was occasionally careless in his geographical allusions. Thus, in "The Winter's Tale" he makes Bohemia border on the sea and

places the oracle of Apollo at Delphi on the "island" of Delphos!

If Inverness is to be rejected, as is assumed by both the works of reference above mentioned, then the evidence is entirely in favour of Glamis Castle, as I hope no son of Forfarshire will care to deny. R. W. SHANNON.

Regina, June 18, 1923.

IN LIGHTER VEIN.

LAW AND FICTION.

The trial in "Pickwick" is, of course, a caricature, but that at the Old Bailey in the "Tale of Two Cities," is accurate. George Eliot made "Felix Holt" turn on a rare but good point of law, and a few years ago, when "Perlycross " appeared, Mr. Blackmore was specially praised for his legal accuracy. On the other hand, in "Wuthering Heights," by Emily Bronte there is a deal of bad law.

Mr. Justice Gazalee, as is well known, is the original of Dickens' Mr. Justice Stareleigh (Gase-Gaze-Stare) who presided at the trial of "Bardell v. Pickwick." Apropos of this cause celèbre Dickens' students may like to know that there is a reported case in 1827, namely Brooke v. Pickwick (4 Bingham, 218), where the defendant was a well-known coach proprietor of Bath, Mr. Pickwick, from whom Dickens avowedly took the name of his immortal papers. The action was to recover damages for the loss of a trunk and one of the judges was Gazalee, J. Here we have two of the chief figures in the great scene meeting in actual life in the same capacities as in the better known book. In Mr. Stanley Weyman's novel " Chippinge which turns upon the great Reform Bill of 1832, Sir Charles Wetherell, Attorney-General, plays a great part. In the riots in 1831, at Bristol, of which he was Recorder, he barely escaped. with his life by night. He was not remarkable for personal propriety, and when some one asked how he escaped, the answer was, disguised in a clean shirt." There are two other modern novels which from a legal as well as literary point of view are well worth perusal. One is "The Witness for the Defence," by A. E. W. Mason, and the other bears the curious title of "The Honest Lawyer," by Miss C. V. McFadden, and turns on the old law regarding Wills, and the odd crime of injuring a bridge

which was punishable with death. They are both absorbing stories. Sir Francis Newbolt, K.C., describes "Orley Farm," by Anthony Trollope, as "the most venomous and pointed attack ever made on the legal profession."

The story turns on the forgery of a will. The Judge's charge, he says, amounted to this: "Whoever here is charged with whatever it is, did not do it."

Lady Mason, who was accused of the forgery, does not appear to have been in the dock during the trial, as the Judge when the verdict of "Not Guilty" was brought in, said: "If the prisoner is in Court, she may go."

SPORTING ASPECT OF THE BENCH.

Wigmore, in his work on Evidence (1905 ed., par. 784) says: The sporting theory of the common law, in which litigation was a game of skill, to be conducted according to specific rules and to be decided by the combined efforts of skill, strength and luck, tended to place the judge primarily in the position of the umpire of a game, whose duty it was to interfere only so far as needed to decide whether the rules of the game had been violated. This tendency never dominated (as far as the Judge's functions were concerned) in the orthodox English practice; the Judge there has never ceased to perform an active and virile part as a director of the proceedings and as an administrator of justice. Nevertheless in the United States the degenerate tendency has steadily been towards the domination of the function of umpire presiding over contestants in a game; not only has public opinion pressed towards this end, but the judiciary as a whole has often not resisted, but rather abdicated."

Lord Herschell interrupted Counsel in Allen v. Flood so much that Lord Morris was heard to ejaculate, "I understand now what it means 'to molest a man in his business.""

* Lord Shaw of Dunfermline tells an interesting incident about the decision of the House of Lords in the "Wee Free" Church case. He says that when first argued the Judges stood 3 to 3. But before judgment was delivered Lord Shand died, and new Judges heard the re-argument, reversing the judgment by a majority.

WE have ventured to make the subject of Legal Education a special feature of the present number of the REVIEW, having been moved thereto by the need-existing for a long time and now clamant-for improving the present standards of professional training and deepening the zeal for knowledge on the part of those who seek admission to the Bar. Indeed, both in this country and in the United States there is a call to scrap sterile methods in the whole field of pedagogics, and for an orientation of the student to the business of being trained for intelligent and unqualifiedly useful modern citizenship. One of the most promising answers to this demand is the plan of instruction for freshmen at Harvard, recently introduced by Professor John Tucker Murray, whereby the imagination of the students is sought to be stirred at the outset of their college life by a compendious view of the whole field of knowledge, this being followed by a programme of instruction designed to give them a more or less definite understanding of the scope and purpose of its various branches. By such means it is believed that the freshmen will escape the period of bewilderment which was inevitably the lot of even the most conscientious student under old conditions, and

1 EDITOR'S NOTE.-Contributions to this department of the REVIEW are cordially invited. Matter not prepared by the Editor will be authenticated by the names or initials of the writers.

C.B.R.-VOL. 1.-41

be more fully prepared to choose a congenial sphere of concentration in their sophomore year.

Hilaire Belloc in one of his recent essays observes that the most obvious example of the stupidity which besets the present time is the unconscious assumption of knowledge by those who are unpossessed of it. What Mr. Belloc here stigmatizes is the deadliest form of ignorance, something that can only obtain in an age of fatuous optimism. It is Main Street's invitation to euthanasia for the mind. Its corrective is divine discontent with anything that lacks the very hardest effort of the very best of our faculties.

Regarding more directly the matter of studious preparation for admission to the Bar, it may be too much to expect the neophyte of today to use the fine prayer for knowledge composed by Dr. Johnson when contemplating the law as a possible avocation, but at least he might be induced to ponder the words of President Quincy at the dedication of the Dane Law School in 1833:

"When we consider that in all critical exigencies of the State to them [the lawyers], more than to any other class, society is accustomed to look for counsel and direction-the duty of increasing the means and multiplying the chances of perpetuating, in that profession, a learned, talented and conscientious body of men, can scarcely be overrated or by any strength of language exaggerated."

These words, too, have a message for those who direct and for those who are privileged to endow our schools of law at the present time.

THE American Bar Association, during its forty-sixth Annual Meeting held at Minneapolis in August, unanimously adopted the following resolution:

"Resolved: (1) That the members of the American Bar Association greatly appreciate the action of their English brethren in extending to