A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of
a company of some hundred and fifty men and women not labouring under any
suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, though the shining subject of
much popular prejudice (at which point I thought the judge's eye had a cast in
my direction), was almost immaculate. There had been, he admitted, a trivial
blemish or so in its rate of progress, but this was exaggerated and had been
entirely owing to the "parsimony of the public," which guilty public, it
appeared, had been until lately bent in the most determined manner on by no
means enlarging the number of Chancery judges appointed--I believe by Richard
the Second, but any other king will do as well.
This seemed to me too profound a joke to be inserted in the body of this book
or I should have restored it to Conversation Kenge or to Mr. Vholes, with one or
other of whom I think it must have originated. In such mouths I might have
coupled it with an apt quotation from one of Shakespeare's sonnets:
"My nature is subdued To what it works in, like the dyer's hand: Pity me,
then, and wish I were renewed!"
But as it is wholesome that the parsimonious public should know what has been
doing, and still is doing, in this connexion, I mention here that everything set
forth in these pages concerning the Court of Chancery is substantially true, and
within the truth. The case of Gridley is in no essential altered from one of
actual occurrence, made public by a disinterested person who was professionally
acquainted with the whole of the monstrous wrong from beginning to end. At the
present moment (August, 1853) there is a suit before the court which was
commenced nearly twenty years ago, in which from thirty to forty counsel have
been known to appear at one time, in which costs have been incurred to the
amount of seventy thousand pounds, which is A FRIENDLY SUIT, and which is (I am
assured) no nearer to its termination now than when it was begun. There is
another well-known suit in Chancery, not yet decided, which was commenced before
the close of the last century and in which more than double the amount of
seventy thousand pounds has been swallowed up in costs. If I wanted other
authorities for Jarndyce and Jarndyce, I could rain them on these pages, to the
shame of--a parsimonious public.
There is only one other point on which I offer a word of remark. The
possibility of what is called spontaneous combustion has been denied since the
death of Mr. Krook; and my good friend Mr. Lewes (quite mistaken, as he soon
found, in supposing the thing to have been abandoned by all authorities)
published some ingenious letters to me at the time when that event was
chronicled, arguing that spontaneous combustion could not possibly be. I have no
need to observe that I do not wilfully or negligently mislead my readers and
that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject.
There are about thirty cases on record, of which the most famous, that of the
Countess Cornelia de Baudi Cesenate, was minutely investigated and described by
Giuseppe Bianchini, a prebendary of Verona, otherwise distinguished in letters,
who published an account of it at Verona in 1731, which he afterwards
republished at Rome. The appearances, beyond all rational doubt, observed in
that case are the appearances observed in Mr. Krook's case. The next most famous
instance happened at Rheims six years earlier, and the historian in that case is
Le Cat, one of the most renowned surgeons produced by France. The subject was a
woman, whose husband was ignorantly convicted of having murdered her; but on
solemn appeal to a higher court, he was acquitted because it was shown upon the
evidence that she had died the death of which this name of spontaneous
combustion is given. I do not think it necessary to add to these notable facts,
and that general reference to the authorities which will be found at page 30,
vol. ii.,* the recorded opinions and experiences of distinguished medical
professors, French, English, and Scotch, in more modern days, contenting myself
with observing that I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a
considerable spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences
are usually received.
In Bleak House I have purposely dwelt upon the romantic side of familiar
things.
1853
* Another case, very clearly described by a dentist, occurred at the town of
Columbus, in the United States of America, quite recently. The subject was a
German who kept a liquor-shop aud was an inveterate drunkard.
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