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Edward Abbott Sir Parry
The Seven Lamps of Advocacy
Published by Good Press, 2021
EAN 4066338065810
Table of Contents
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I
THE LAMP
OF HONESTY
I
THE LAMP OF HONESTY
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The great advocate is like the great actor: he fills the stage for his span of life, succeeds, gains our applause, makes his last bow, and the curtain falls. Nothing is so elusive as the art of acting, unless indeed it be the sister art of advocacy. You cannot say that the methods of Garrick, Kean or Irving, Erskine, Hawkins or Russell, were the right methods or the only methods, or even that they were the best methods of practising their several arts; you can only say that they succeeded in their day, and that their contemporaries acclaimed them as masters.
Inasmuch as their methods were often new and startling to their own generation, the young student of acting or advocacy is eager to believe that there are no methods and no technique to learn, and no school in which to graduate. Youth is at all times prone to act on the principle that there are no principles, that there is no one from whom it can learn, and nothing to teach. Any one, it seems, can don a wig and gown, and thereby become an advocate. Yet there are principles of advocacy; and if a few generations were to forget to practise these, it would indeed be a lost art. The student of advocacy can draw inspiration and hope from the stored-up experience of his elders. He can trace in the plans and life-charts of the ancients the paths along which they strode, journeying towards Eldorado. True, these figures of forgotten advocates are dim and obscure—only to be painfully seen through the dusty gauzes of forgotten years, pictured for us in drowsy voluminous memoirs, or baldly reported in mouldering law reports; but if we search these records diligently we gradually discern a race of worthy men—see them haunting the old libraries, pacing the ancient halls with their clients, proud of the traditions of their great profession—advocates—advocates all.