The students and juniors were in their usual places, sitting at
the feet of their favourite Common-law Judge; but the idlers who came for
amusement, to saunter about the hall, haggle for books with the second-hand
dealers along the south wall, or flirt with the milliners who kept stalls
for bands and other legal finery on the opposite side, or to listen on
tiptoe, with an ear above the panelled enclosure, to the quips and cranks
or fierce rhetoric of a famous advocate--these to-day gravitated with one
accord towards the south-west corner of the Hall, where, in the Court of
King's Bench, Richard Revel, Baron Fareham, of Fareham, Hants, was to be
tried by a Buckinghamshire jury for abduction, with fraud, malice, and
violence, and for assault, with intent to murder.
The rank of the offender being high, and the indictment known to involve
tragic details of family history, there had been much talk of the cause
which was on the paper for to-day; and, as a natural consequence, besides
the habitual loungers and saunterers, gossips, and book-buyers, there was
a considerable sprinkling of persons of quality, who perfumed the not too
agreeable atmosphere with pulvilio and Florentine iris powder, and the
rustle of whose silks and brocades was audible all over the Hall.
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