for writing this play, I would like to know on what grounds ne would decide it. There are two reasons for my query. Lord Bacon, great lawyer as he was unquestionably, great scientific man, great statesman, and great philosopher, was at the same time the only man who in those days was the rival of Lord Coke in the law. He could not, without a complete intellectual abandonment of his own legal learning, his own mental integrity, and everything that a lawyer would hold sacred as principles of justice and of law, have written that play. It would have involved a complete moral and mental abnegation of himself; it would have been an impossibility, because we all know that men, whenever they exert their intellectual faculties, cannot stifle their own convictions, and also their own professional training without self betrayal. But there is a special reason, more important than this. We of the present day, are entirely familiar with the jurisdiction in chancery to restrain by injunction the execution of any decree obtained at law which is illegal or contrary to public policy. In the days of Shakespeare that jurisdiction had just been established. The Lord Chancellor prior to Lord Bacon's occupying the woolsack, in the midst of Shakespeare's period, was Sir Thomas Egerton, afterwards Lord Ellesmere, and there had been a controversy raging as to whether the chancellor had jurisdiction to restrain the execution of a judgment obtained at law which was vitiated by fraud, or which wore on its face an illegal consideration. The parties to that controversy, which shook Westminster Hall, were Coke and Ellesmere. Into that great fight Lord Bacon threw himself. Embittered by his hatred of, and jealous enmity to Coke, he backed the Chancellor, and the Chancellor won. Therefore that which is one of the most brilliant triumphs of Bacon's legal career

would have been completely abandoned. The conclusion that Bacon wrote that play is absurd.

I thank you for your very close attention to what I have said. I have run into greater length than I had intended.

THE WAGES OF SIN: "THE GLORIOUS UNCERTAINTY OF THE LAW."

WILLIAM A. KETCHAM, INDIANAPOLIS.

I.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE.

(a) Primary:

1. DANIEL CLARK, "a broth of a boy," born a citizen of Great Britain and a subject of King George III, in 1766; coming to New Orleans, then a French province, in 1797; inheriting his uncle's enormous wealth in 1799; a prominent factor in the closing hours of Napoleon's power in Louisiana; a consul of the United States prior to the Louisiana purchase, and a representative in Congress from the territory after the purchase; the father of two children by another man's wife; executing a will in favor of his mother in 1811, and writing one in favor of his younger daughter in 1813, a few weeks before his death; if married at all, was paying attention to another lady with a view to matrimony, and actually engaged to be married to a third at the time of his death, and this without the formality of any kind of a legal separation from his first wife-if she was his wife.

2. ZULIME CARRIERE, a French lady of great beauty and attractiveness, who, at the age of thirteen, in 1794 married a French nobleman, greatly reduced in cir

3.

cumstances, of advanced age-just how far advanced is not disclosed, but young enough to have had a son -who was the keeper of a confectionery shop, and was sent abroad in 1801, leaving his wife, who about that time entered upon a liaison with Clark, by whom she had two daughters, one born in 1802 and the other in 1806; who claimed to be married to Clark in 1802 or 1803, without the formality of being divorced from her first husband, Des Grange; and who, without the formality of a divorce from either Des Grange or Clark, was married to Gardette in 1808, and lived with him as his wife until 1831, when he died, and she survived him until 1853.

MRS. MYRA CLARK GAINES, the plaintiff in all the litigation, the daughter-whether natural or legitimate to be discussed later-of Daniel Clark; married at one time to Mr. Whitney, and after his death. to General Gaines.

4. RICHARD RELF, one of Clark's partners in his Louisiana ventures, one of the executors of Clark's will of 1811, and a prominent figure in all the Clark's will litigation.

(b) Secondary: Principally important as witnesses:

Mesdames Despau and Caillavet, Zulime's sisters, Madame Benguerel; Coxe, Clark's partner in his Philadelphia matters; De la Croix, Clark's friend, tutor for his daughter, Myra, and, with Pitot and Bellechasse, executor under the will of 1813; Boisfontaine, Clark's overseer, brother to Mrs. Davis; Colonel Davis, to whom Myra was committed when

an infant, and who brought her up as his daughter; Mrs. Harper, niece of Colonel Davis, Myra's fostermother; General Gaines, who married Myra in 1839, after the death of her first husband, Whitney, in 1837, and who stood stoutly by her through all her litigations, up to the time of his death in 1849.

(c) Tertiary: Judges who really settled the questions in controversy:

(a)

(a) Mr. Justice Wayne.
(b) Mr. Justice Campbell.

II.

FOREWORD.

While reading law in August, 1868, there was published in Putnam's Magazine, an intensely interesting article on the Myra Clark Gaines litigations, including the case in 6th Wallace. Being attracted by the article, I studied with care all the decisions which had been handed down up to that time by the Supreme Court of the United States, but not, as I now recall, any of the Circuit Court decisions, or those of the Supreme Court of Louisiana. While I was gathering data with the view of possibly preparing a paper on the subject of the litigation, my attention was called to a paper prepared by Mr. J. Carroll Payne, of the Atlanta bar, on the subject of this litigation, and read before the Georgia State Bar Association in 1896, which was so interesting that he received an encore in 1911.

This rather put a stop to the idea of my preparing a paper, for the reason that I thought I could not hope to do so well, but, upon further consideration, in as much as my