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. EveryChancellor 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