In July, 1852, when only 32 years of age, he was elected to Parliament as a Conservative, and in 1858, at the age of 38, he became Solicitor General in Lord Derby's second ministry-a post which, Bryce says, few eminent lawyers have reached before 50. From that date until his death, Cairns was one of the "chief assets" of the Conservative party. Bryce speaks of his "splendid oratorical gifts" saying that he "had a matchless power of statement and a no less matchless closeness and cogency in argument;" and that "he was greater as a speaker upon legal topics where a power of exact statement and lucid exposition is required than anyone he left behind him.”

The resignation of the Derby ministry in 1859 was followed by seven years of tremendous activity and labor upon the part of Cairns at the bar. He was constantly retained in Scotch and Irish appeals in the House of Lords and in cases before the Privy Council. His greatest jury speech was in the inquiry into the insanity of a Mr. Windham. The case lasted thirty-four days from December 16, 1861, to January 31, 1862. The peroration of the speech is given in Atlay as a specimen of what Cairns might have accomplished at nisi prius had he devoted himself less exclusively to the chancery courts.

Cairns' strength, however, was in Chancery and in the House of Lords.

* * * *

"At the chancery bar," says Bryce, "he was one of the trio who had not been surpassed, if ever equalled during the nineteenth century, and whom none of our now practicing advocates rivals. The other two were Mr., afterwards Lord Justice, Rolt, and Mr. Roundell Palmer, afterwards Lord Chancellor Selborne. All were admirable lawyers. Cairns was broad, massive, convincing, with a robust urgency of logic which seemed to grasp and fix you, so that while he spoke you could fancy no conclusion possible save that toward which he moved. His habit was to seize upon what he deemed the central and vital point of the case throwing the whole force of his argument upon that one point and holding the judge's mind.

fast to it. All these famous men were raised to the judicial bench.

Rolt remained there for a few months only, so his time. was too short to permit him to enrich our jurisprudence and leave a memory of himself in the reports. Palmer sat in the House of Lords from his accession to the Chancellorship in 1872 till his death in 1896, and, while fully sustaining his reputation as a man of eminent legal capacity, was, on the whole, less brilliant as a judge than he had been as an advocate, because a tendency to over-refinement is more dangerous in the judicial than in the forensic mind. He made an admirable Chancellor, and showed himself more industrious and more zealous for law reform than did Cairns. But Cairns was the greater judge, and became to the generation which argued before him a model of judicial excellence. In hearing a cause he was singularly patient, rarely interrupting counsel, and then only to put some pertinent question. His figure was so still, his countenance so impassive, that people sometimes doubted whether he was really attending to all that was urged at the bar. But when the time came for him to deliver judgment, which in the House of Lords is done in the form of a speech addressed to the House in moving or supporting a motion that is to become the judgment of the tribunal, it was seen how fully he had apprehended the case in all its bearings. His deliverances were never lengthy, but they were exhaustive. They went straight to the vital principles on which the question turned, stated these in the most luminous way, and applied them with unerring exactitude to the particular facts. It is as a storehouse of fundamental doctrines that his judgments are so valuable. They disclose less knowledge of case-law than do those of some other judges; but Cairns was not one of the men who love cases for their own sake, and he never cared to draw upon, still less to display, more learning than was needed for the matter in hand. It was in the grasp of the principles involved, in the breadth of view which enabled him to see these principles in their relation to one another, in the precision of the logic which

drew conclusions from the principles, in the perfectly lucid language in which the principles were expounded and ap-、 plied, that his strength lay. Herein he surpassed the most eminent of contemporary judges, the then Master of the Rolls, for while Jessel had perhaps a quicker mind than Cairns, he had not so wide a mind, nor one so thoroughly philosophical in the methods by which it moved."

At the age of 47, an Irishman and an Irish member, Cairns became Attorney-General, an office which had never before been filled by anyone not a native of Great Britain. The labors of that place, however, proved to be too great a strain upon his health and he accepted in 1867 the office of Lord Justice of Appeal, with a seat in the House of Lords. The next year he was made Lord Chancellor by Mr. Disraeli, then Prime Minister, who afterwards caused him to be raised to an earldom. Mr. Bryce says that, of all the members of Disraeli's two cabinets, Cairns was the one whom that statesman most trusted and relied on of which he gives convincing illustration.

a fact

Cairns' second Chancellorship began with Disraeli's return to power in 1874. Says Atlay: "He was only 55 and his faculties were at their highest pitch; the years which followed were momentous beyond all precedent in the history of English law and legal institutions."

The late Mr. Benjamin, who had conducted many cases of the greatest importance before the highest courts of both the United States and Great Britain, pronounced Cairns the greatest lawyer before whom he had ever argued. A number of cases, in which his more notable judgments were delivered, are mentioned by Atlay. For the statutes whereby the "fabric of English justice was reshaped" Cairns is declared entitled to a full, if not the fullest share of the credit. The restoration of the House of Lords as the final court of appeal was one of Cairns' achievements.

Upon the defeat of the Conservatives in 1880, Cairns finally left the Chancellorship. During the agitation against the House of Lords in 1884, his speech on the Franchise bill of that year was the armory whence the upholders of

that body drew their arguments. He appeared for the last time in the House of Lords on March 18, 1885, and on the following 1st of April he died. "As a judge," says Bryce, "he will be held in honorable remembrance as one of the five or six most brilliant luminaries that have adorned the English bench since those remote days in which the beginning of legal memory is placed."

Sir George Jessel.

I shall not stop to review Bryce's biographical study of Sir George Jessel, the great Master of the Rolls, some of whose decisions are declared in the preface to Brett's Leading Cases in Equity to have laid the foundation of what is called modern equity jurisprudence. The sketch is chiefly interesting as describing the intellectual characteristics of its subject, the striking and original methods whereby he dispatched the tremendous business and the innumerable cases in the cause list at the Rolls, and the qualities of his powerful judgments, which Mr. Bryce declares "fill so many of the recent English law reports" and "are among the best that have ever gone to build up the fabric of the English law." It is a remarkable fact that these extraordinary opinions were, with two exceptions, delivered on the spur of the moment at the end of the arguments. "But," says Bryce, "they have all the merits of carefully considered utterances, so clear and direct is their style, so concisely as well as cogently are the authorities discussed and the grounds of decisions stated. The bold and sweeping character which often belongs to them makes them more instructive as well as more agreeable reading than the judgments of most modern judges, whose commonest fault is a timidity which tries to escape, by dwelling on the details of the particular case, from the enunciation of a definite general principle."

Sir Charles Russell,

In Barry O'Brien's "Life of Lord Russell of Killowen" we have a stirring biography of one of the most famous lawyers of modern times. He was born at Ballybot, in the north of Ireland, November 10, 1832, in the same section of the isle where Cairns first saw the light. His early practice was in Belfast, where his chief employments were in defending Catholic prisoners charged with assaults on Protestant missionaries.

In 1856 his few years of practice as a solicitor in Ireland came to an end, to be succeeded by his brilliant career at the English bar. He left for London to enter Lincoln's Inn in October, 1856. In January, 1859, he was called to the bar. In December, 1861, he appeared in his first important case, the celebrated Windham lunacy inquiry, in which, as before stated, Sir Hugh Cairns added so greatly to his own renown. About the same time he appeared before the Liverpool assizes in a murder case, which provoked considerable public interest. Writing of this period, he himself says: "I concentrated my attention on the bar; I did not allow myself to be distracted. It is the only way you can succeed at the bar."

The record of his fees shows that his business steadily increased until, after ten years, it yielded him for the year 1870, 4,230 pounds, about $21,000.00. He obtained his silk gown in 1872.

As to his characteristics in the study of his cases, his biographer states that Russell's motto was "Thorough!" and that "he believed profoundly in the maxim." The qualities he is said to have loved best were accuracy, lucidity, brevity and keeping to the point. Disraeli once described “the legal mind as chiefly displaying itself in illustrating the obvious, explaining the evident and expatiating on the common place." Referring to this sarcasm, Russell's biographer declares the future Chief Justice was "well content" to confine himself to the "obvious and the evident,” that "his was not a subtle mind, nor was it stored with the