A Chancery judge once had the kindness to inform me, as one of a institution of several hundred and fifty men and women not drudging under any suspicions of lunacy, that the Court of Chancery, although the shining subject of more popular prejudice (at which point I thought the judge's eye had a cast in my direction), was about 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 recently 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 another king wish do as well.

This seemed to me too profound a joke