of the cause before him, seizing intuitively upon the decisive facts and recognizing the legal principles applicable to them, appreci ating the difficulties, but at the same time recognizing the means of avoiding them, and unerringly, if sometimes hesitatingly, reaching the correct conclusion with a clear ness of judgment which, in the words of no favorably inclined critic, amounted to a gen ius for the law, he had without exception all the intellectual qualities necessary to enable him to use his high position to the best and greatest advantage. And the industry which he brought to the performance of his duties was no less marked; for sitting in his court he toiled with a tireless zeal and persistence that was at once the admiration and the despair of the bar, and rendered him per haps the most laborious judge that ever sat upon the woolsack. The key to Lord Eldon's relation to the history of the law is found in the intense conservatism of his nature. The great in tellectual strength and supreme legal ability that we recognize in him were not devoted to the improvement of the common law as a code or its development as a science. The influence that he exerted was necessarily great, the greater because throughout it was exerted undeviatingly in the same direction. But that influence was of a character wholly negative and repressive, and to be under stood in its full measure and importance only in connection with the history of the period immediately preceding his rise to power. In the generation before Lord Eldon's chancellorship a force of widely different character had been exerted upon the devel opment of legal science. Lord Mansfield, a man fully imbued with a progressive spirit, had, as Lord Chief-Justice of England, main tained an overpowering ascendency. Three times refusing the proffer of the great seal, he had, without occupying the more exalted office, exercised a sway fully as complete in things legal as that ordinarily accorded to the Lord Chancellor. In his administration
of the law, both in the Court of King's Bench and in the House of Lords, he had been almost autocratic. With a mind less subtle perhaps than that of Lord Eldon and with a judgment less intuitively correct, Lord Mansfield was cast in a broader mould. A brilliant scholar, deeply versed in the doc trines of the civil law, and drawing freely from that great source of learning, he was .a jurist as well as a judge. He recognized the capacities of the common law, and inspired by its wider aims, sought to lead it on to a higher development, to fill out its proportions, and to harmonize its parts. The versatility that made him in his earlier years a welcome companion when " drinking champagne with the wits," and that led men of letters to la ment " how sweet an Ovid was in Murray lost," freed him from the insular .prejudices that bound many of his most learned con temporaries. His was not a nature to bow down before the force of purely technical rules or to shrink from following a principle rather than yield to a precedent. Justly reliant on his own powers, he refused to ac cept as binding authorities decisions which he deemed opposed to the fundamental spirit of the law. He boldly asserted that his court did not " sit here to take our rules of evidence from Siderfin and Keble." And with a rare creative genius he did not hesi tate to remodel the old and lay foundations in previously unturned ground for a further and far-reaching growth. Never before or since has a single judge so strongly set the impress of his individual intellect upon the jurisprudence of his times. Under Lord Mansfield's hand the commer cial law of England came into being in much the same form in which it has survived. He won for the decisions of English courts a recognition previously refused them as au thorities on questions of international law. The law of evidence " he found of brick and left of marble." Like Lord Eldon he did not resort to legislation, and no acts associ ated with his name are found upon the stat ute-book; but through his judgments he
