AFTER DINNER JUDGMENTS.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XII, Issue 203, 28 August 1877, Page 4

AFTER DINNER JUDGMENTS.

[From the London Telegraph.'] English Judges are pre-eminently and traditionally distinguished, not alone for their integrity of character, but for (he depth and breadth of their legal erudition, and the universality of their information on general topic?, and especially for the reteativenesa of their memories. It is however possible—and just, possible — for the memory of a Judge to be^for a moment at fault, and such a temporary slip raema to have occurred to Mr Justice Huddleston, when, daring a trial at the Old Bailey oa Wednesday, he expressed himself unable to understand what Mr Willis, one of the Counsel pleading before him, meant by an allusion to the " afterdinner , decisions " of bygone times. His Lordship went on to remark that in the olden days the Judges used to dine •at noon, and that their day was apportioned in the following manner: eight hoars work and meals, eight hours for sleep, aad eight hours for prayer. This may be; but touching " afterdiauer decisions," His Lordship might be respectfully counselled to refresh hia memory by reading once more the novels of Theodore Hook. In one of those tales, "Gilbert Guruey," he will find a most graphic description of a sitting, both before and after dinner, at the Central Criminal Court. The hero; is invited by a Sheriff to dine at the Sessions House, in the Old Bailey, aad the banquet takes place then as it still does, at 8 in the evening. The ttiala by this time are over ; but passing sentence, in accordance with the customs of the age some fifty years "since, is deferred until after dinner. It is over the wine and the walnuts upstairs that <( the learned Judge, having pieced his spectacles on hisnoae, began to peruse the names and crime which the book of fate contained, and to apportion to each culprit tried that day such a quantum of punishment ea he may seem to deserve." Much of what follows is so much gross burlesque. Suffice it to say, that the Judge, the Sheriffs, and the Bar, having finished their two bottles a piece, go downstairs, followed by the guests, into Court again, when, adds the novelist, Gilbert sees the capital convicts brought into the dock, and hears one of the most awful addresses ever made to guilty creatures delivered by a Judge, who, a faw moments before, had seemed to be of the world, worldly. The Under Sheriff, who aits near Gilbert, whispers to him that as he heard the sentence, he might like to " witness the execution ot those doomed to die," adding, with an expression of much bonhommie, ** We hang at eight, and breakfast at nine/' This done, Hook states in a note to the chapter that his picture of the evening sittings ac the Old Bailey, sketched oa the spot, although obviously a caricature, ia correct in its leading facts. And Charles Dickens, in one of his earliest articles, descriptive of the gaol ac Newgate, expresses bis satisfaction at the abolition of the evening sittings. Any tile of a newspaper of tte period will, however, withe out any caricature at all, afford ample information respecting " alter diouer decisions " in criminal casas at least. Happily, those decisions have become, long since, things of the past.