[17] Of these renderings the subjoined may be taken as favorable specimens:--"Breve originale, original sinne; capias, a catch to a sad tune; alias capias, another to the same (sad tune); habeas corpus, a trooper; capias ad satisfaciend., a hangman: latitat, bo-peep; nisi prius, first come first served; demurrer, hum and haw; scandal. magnat., down with the Lords."
[18] Even vacations stink in the nostrils of Mr. Rogers; for he maintains that they are not so much periods when lawyers cease from their odious practices, as times of repose and recreation wherein they gain fresh vigor and daring for the commission of further outrages, and allow their unhappy victims to acquire just enough wealth to render them worth the trouble of despoiling.
One of the strangest cases of corruption amongst English Judges still remains to be told on the slender authority which is the sole foundation of the weighty accusation. In comparatively recent times there have not been many eminent Englishmen to whom 'tradition's simple tongue' has been more hostile than Queen Elizabeth's Lord Chief Justice, Popham. The younger son of a gentle family, John Popham passed from Oxford to the Middle Temple, raised himself to the honors of the ermine, secured the admiration of illustrious contemporaries, in his latter years gained abundant praise for wholesome severity towards footpads, and at his death left behind him a name--which, tradition informs us, belonged to a man who in his reckless youth, and even after his call to the bar, was a cut-purse and highwayman. In mitigation of his conduct it is urged by those who credit the charge, that young gentlemen of his date were so much addicted to the lawless excitement of the road, that when he was still a beardless stripling, an act (1 Ed. VI. c. 12, s. 14) was passed, whereby any peer of the realm or lord of parliament, on a first conviction for robbery, was entitled to benefit of clergy, though he could not read. But bearing in mind the liberties which rumor is wont to take with the names of eminent persons, the readiness the multitude always display to attribute light morals to grave men, and the infrequency of the cases where a dissolute youth is the prelude to a manhood of strenuous industry and an old age of honor--the cautious reader will require conclusive testimony before he accepts Popham's connection with 'the road' as one of the unassailable facts of history.