Walters, K.C., opened the case for the
prosecution.
Mr. Walters was a long-winded Counsel who had detested the late Mr.
Justice Fewbanks because of the latter's habit of interrupting the
addresses of Counsel with the object of inducing them to curtail their
remarks. This practice was not only annoying to Counsel, who necessarily
knew better than the judge what the jury ought to be told, but it also
tended to hold Counsel up to ridicule in the eyes of ignorant jurymen as
a man who could not do his work properly without the watchful correction
of the judge. But Mr. Walters, whose legal training had imbued in him a
respect for Latin tags, subscribed to the adage, _de mortuis nil nisi
bonum_. Therefore he began his address to the jury with a glowing
reference to the loss, he might almost say the irreparable loss, which
the judiciary had sustained, he would go so far as to say the loss which
the nation had sustained by the death, the violent death, in short, the
murder, of an eminent judge of the High Court Bench, whose clear and
vigorous intellect, whose marvellous mastery of the legal principles laid
down by the judicial giants of the past, whose inexhaustible knowledge
drawn from the storehouses of British law, whose virile interpretations
of the principles of British justice, whose unfailing courtesy and
consideration to Counsel, the memory of which would long be cherished by
those who had had the privilege of pleading before him, had made him an
acquisition and an ornament to a Bench which in the eyes of the nation
had always represented, and at no time more than the present--at this
point Mr.
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