CHAPTER I
 
 

    In Chancery
 

        London.  Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor

        sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall.  Implacable November weather.  As

        much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from

        the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a

        Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine

        lizard up Holborn Hill.  Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots,

        making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as

        full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for

        the death of the sun.  Dogs, undistinguishable in mire.  Horses,

        scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers.  Foot passengers,

        jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill

        temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of

        thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding

        since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits

        to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points

        tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.
 
 

        Fog everywhere.  Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits

        and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the

        tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and

        dirty) city.  Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights.

        Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on

        the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping

        on the gunwales of barges and small boats.  Fog in the eyes and

        throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides

        of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of

        the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching

        the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck.

        Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a

        nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a

        balloon and hanging in the misty clouds.
 
 

        Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much

        as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by

        husbandman and ploughboy.  Most of the shops lighted two hours

        before their time--as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard

        and unwilling look.
 
 

        The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the

        muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction,

        appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old

        corporation, Temple Bar.  And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn

        Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor

        in his High Court of Chancery.
 
 

        Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and

        mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition

        which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners,

        holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.
 
 

        On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be

        sitting her--as here he is--with a foggy glory round his head,

        softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a

        large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an

        interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to

        the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog.  On such

        an afternoon some score of members of the High Court of Chancery

        bar ought to be--as here they are--mistily engaged in one of the

        ten thousand stages of an endless cause, tripping one another up on
 
        slippery precedents, groping knee-deep in technicalities, running

        their goat-hair and horsehair warded heads against walls of words

        and making a pretence of equity with serious faces, as players

        might.  On such an afternoon the various solicitors in the cause,

        some two or three of whom have inherited it from their fathers, who

        made a fortune by it, ought to be--as are they not?--ranged in a

        line, in a long matted well (but you might look in vain for truth

        at the bottom of it) between the registrar's red table and the silk

        gowns, with bills, cross-bills, answers, rejoinders, injunctions,

        affidavits, issues, references to masters, masters' reports,

        mountains of costly nonsense, piled before them.  Well may the

        court be dim, with wasting candles here and there; well may the fog

        hang heavy in it, as if it would never get out; well may the

        stained-glass windows lose their colour and admit no light of day

        into the place; well may the uninitiated from the streets, who peep

        in through the glass panes in the door, be deterred from entrance

        by its owlish aspect and by the drawl, languidly echoing to the

        roof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into

        the lantern that has no light in it and where the attendant wigs

        are all stuck in a fog-bank!  This is the Court of Chancery, which

        has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire,

        which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse and its dead in

        every churchyard, which has its ruined suitor with his slipshod

        heels and threadbare dress borrowing and begging through the round

        of every man's acquaintance, which gives to monied might the means

        abundantly of wearying out the right, which so exhausts finances,

        patience, courage, hope, so overthrows the brain and breaks the
 
        heart, that there is not an honourable man among its practitioners

        who would not give--who does not often give--the warning, "Suffer

        any wrong that can be done you rather than come here!"
 
 

        Who happen to be in the Lord Chancellor's court this murky

        afternoon besides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel in the cause,

        two or three counsel who are never in any cause, and the well of

        solicitors before mentioned?  There is the registrar below the

        judge, in wig and gown; and there are two or three maces, or petty-

        bags, or privy purses, or whatever they may be, in legal court

        suits.  These are all yawning, for no crumb of amusement ever falls

        from Jarndyce and Jarndyce (the cause in hand), which was squeezed

        dry years upon years ago.  The short-hand writers, the reporters of

        the court, and the reporters of the newspapers invariably decamp

        with the rest of the regulars when Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on.

        Their places are a blank.  Standing on a seat at the side of the

        hall, the better to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is a little

        mad old woman in a squeezed bonnet who is always in court, from its

        sitting to its rising, and always expecting some incomprehensible

        judgment to be given in her favour.  Some say she really is, or

        was, a party to a suit, but no one knows for certain because no one

        cares.  She carries some small litter in a reticule which she calls

        her documents, principally consisting of paper matches and dry

        lavender.  A sallow prisoner has come up, in custody, for the half-

        dozenth time to make a personal application "to purge himself of

        his contempt," which, being a solitary surviving executor who has

        fallen into a state of conglomeration about accounts of which it is

        not pretended that he had ever any knowledge, he is not at all

        likely ever to do.  In the meantime his prospects in life are

        ended.  Another ruined suitor, who periodically appears from

        Shropshire and breaks out into efforts to address the Chancellor at

        the close of the day's business and who can by no means be made to

        understand that the Chancellor is legally ignorant of his existence

        after making it desolate for a quarter of a century, plants himself

        in a good place and keeps an eye on the judge, ready to call out

        "My Lord!" in a voice of sonorous complaint on the instant of his

        rising.  A few lawyers' clerks and others who know this suitor by

        sight linger on the chance of his furnishing some fun and

        enlivening the dismal weather a little.

        Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on.  This scarecrow of a suit has, in

        course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what

        it means.  The parties to it understand it least, but it has been

        observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five

        minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the

        premises.  Innumerable children have been born into the cause;

        innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old

        people have died out of it.  Scores of persons have deliriously

        found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without

        knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds

        with the suit.  The little plaintiff or defendant who was promised

        a new rocking-horse when Jarndyce and Jarndyce should be settled

        has grown up, possessed himself of a real horse, and trotted away

        into the other world.  Fair wards of court have faded into mothers

        and grandmothers; a long procession of Chancellors has come in and

        gone out; the legion of bills in the suit have been transformed

        into mere bills of mortality; there are not three Jarndyces left

        upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his

        brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and

        Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court,

        perennially hopeless.
 
 

        Jarndyce and Jarndyce has passed into a joke.  That is the only

        good that has ever come of it.  It has been death to many, but it

        is a joke in the profession.  Every master in Chancery has had a

        reference out of it.  Every Chancellor was "in it," for somebody or

        other, when he was counsel at the bar.  Good things have been said

        about it by blue-nosed, bulbous-shoed old benchers in select port-

        wine committee after dinner in hall.  Articled clerks have been in

        the habit of fleshing their legal wit upon it.  The last Lord

        Chancellor handled it neatly, when, correcting Mr. Blowers, the

        eminent silk gown who said that such a thing might happen when the

        sky rained potatoes, he observed, "or when we get through Jarndyce

        and Jarndyce, Mr. Blowers"--a pleasantry that particularly tickled

        the maces, bags, and purses.

        How many people out of the suit Jarndyce and Jarndyce has stretched

        forth its unwholesome hand to spoil and corrupt would be a very

        wide question.  From the master upon whose impaling files reams of

        dusty warrants in Jarndyce and Jarndyce have grimly writhed into

        many shapes, down to the copying-clerk in the Six Clerks' Office

        who has copied his tens of thousands of Chancery folio-pages under

        that eternal heading, no man's nature has been made better by it.

        In trickery, evasion, procrastination, spoliation, botheration,

        under false pretences of all sorts, there are influences that can

        never come to good.  The very solicitors' boys who have kept the

        wretched suitors at bay, by protesting time out of mind that Mr.
 
        Chizzle, Mizzle, or otherwise was particularly engaged and had

        appointments until dinner, may have got an extra moral twist and

        shuffle into themselves out of Jarndyce and Jarndyce.  The receiver

        in the cause has acquired a goodly sum of money by it but has

        acquired too a distrust of his own mother and a contempt for his

        own kind.  Chizzle, Mizzle, and otherwise have lapsed into a habit

        of vaguely promising themselves that they will look into that

        outstanding little matter and see what can be done for Drizzle--who

        was not well used--when Jarndyce and Jarndyce shall be got out of

        the office.  Shirking and sharking in all their many varieties have

        been sown broadcast by the ill-fated cause; and even those who have

        contemplated its history from the outermost circle of such evil

        have been insensibly tempted into a loose way of letting bad things

        alone to take their own bad course, and a loose belief that if the

        world go wrong it was in some off-hand manner never meant to go

        right.
 
 

        Thus, in the midst of the mud and at the heart of the fog, sits the

        Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

        "Mr. Tangle," says the Lord High Chancellor, latterly something

        restless under the eloquence of that learned gentleman.

        "Mlud," says Mr. Tangle.  Mr. Tangle knows more of Jarndyce and

        Jarndyce than anybody.  He is famous for it--supposed never to have

        read anything else since he left school.
 
 

        "Have you nearly concluded your argument?"
 
 

        "Mlud, no--variety of points--feel it my duty tsubmit--ludship," is

        the reply that slides out of Mr. Tangle.
 
 

        "Several members of the bar are still to be heard, I believe?" says

        the Chancellor with a slight smile.
 
 

        Eighteen of Mr. Tangle's learned friends, each armed with a little

        summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in

        a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen

        places of obscurity.
 
 

        "We will proceed with the hearing on Wednesday fortnight," says the

        Chancellor.  For the question at issue is only a question of costs,

        a mere bud on the forest tree of the parent suit, and really will

        come to a settlement one of these days.
 
 

        The Chancellor rises; the bar rises; the prisoner is brought

        forward in a hurry; the man from Shropshire cries, "My lord!"

        Maces, bags, and purses indignantly proclaim silence and frown at

        the man from Shropshire.

        "In reference," proceeds the Chancellor, still on Jarndyce and

        Jarndyce, "to the young girl--"
 
 

        "Begludship's pardon--boy," says Mr. Tangle prematurely.  "In

        reference," proceeds the Chancellor with extra distinctness, "to

        the young girl and boy, the two young people"--Mr. Tangle crushed--

        "whom I directed to be in attendance to-day and who are now in my

        private room, I will see them and satisfy myself as to the

        expediency of making the order for their residing with their

        uncle."
 
 

        Mr. Tangle on his legs again.  "Begludship's pardon--dead."

        "With their"--Chancellor looking through his double eyeglass at the

        papers on his desk--"grandfather."
 
 

        "Begludship's pardon--victim of rash action--brains."
 
 

        Suddenly a very little counsel with a terrific bass voice arises,

        fully inflated, in the back settlements of the fog, and says, "Will

        your lordship allow me?  I appear for him.  He is a cousin, several

        times removed.  I am not at the moment prepared to inform the court

        in what exact remove he is a cousin, but he IS a cousin.
 
 

        Leaving this address (delivered like a sepulchral message) ringing

        in the rafters of the roof, the very little counsel drops, and the
 
        fog  knows him no more.  Everybody looks for him.  Nobody can see

        him.
 
 

        "I will speak with both the young people," says the Chancellor

        anew, "and satisfy myself on the subject of their residing with

        their cousin.  I will mention the matter to-morrow morning when I

        take my seat."
 
 

        The Chancellor is about to bow to the bar when the prisoner is

        presented.  Nothing can possibly come of the prisoner's

        conglomeration but his being sent back to prison, which is soon

        done.  The man from Shropshire ventures another remonstrative "My

        lord!" but the Chancellor, being aware of him, has dexterously

        vanished.  Everybody else quickly vanishes too.  A battery of blue

        bags is loaded with heavy charges of papers and carried off by

        clerks; the little mad old woman marches off with her documents;

        the empty court is locked up.  If all the injustice it has

        committed and all the misery it has caused could only be locked up

        with it, and the whole burnt away in a great funeral pyre--why so

        much the better for other parties than the parties in Jarndyce and

        Jarndyce!
 
 

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