experts in the country. It has been a good deal the fashion to say that he was no lawyer, but this involves a very serious misconception; it may be true enough that, absorbed as he constantly was, all through his career at the Bar, in the prac tice of advocacy, his memory was furnished with a less complete equipment of legal propositions than is possible to those who live laborious days in Chambers; but in the opinion of so competent a critic as the late Lord Bowen, he was the greatest legal genius of his generation. The late Attorney-General's promotion, of course, vacates his parliamentary seat : he sat for the metro politan burgh of Hackney; the Liberal candidate is Mr. Fletcher Moulton, Q.C., our greatest patent lawyer : he was senior wrangler at Cam bridge, and any scientific or mathematical prob lem presents no difficulties to him; science has brought him wealth, but oratory is not his pos session; the son of a well-known Wesleyan clergy man, one might have expected some inherited warmth of discourse, but a colder, drearier speaker you would not easily imagine. From a spectacular point of view, the English legal system can furnish nothing finer than a session of the Court for Crown Cases Reserved, our nearest approximation to a Court of Criminal Appeal; this morning for instance, eleven of the
common law judges sat in the Lord Chief Justice's court, robed in scarlet and ermine, to dispose of some points which would not strike any one as of great intrinsic importance. A good deal of public interest has been excited by the trial of two miserable anarchists at the Old Bailey. Mr. Justice Hawkins, who generally takes important criminal trials, was the judge; one of the criminals pleaded guilty, but the younger culprit, a youth of nineteen, entered a defense; his counsel was Mr. J. Farrelly, who appeared for the first time before an Old Bailey jury, and everything that legal acumen could devise, he urged on behalf of his client; but it was a hopeless case, and sentences of twenty and ten years' penal servitude were imposed re spectively. Mr. Farrelly has hitherto been chiefly known as a very learned writer on questions of international law, but his conduct of this difficult case has shown his equal aptitude for forensic labors. The members of Grays Inn are endeavoring to arrange a ball; as a rule these functions are given by the Benchers, but the Grays Inn bar risters have resolved to try a festivity on their own account, it would of course take place in the picturesque old Hall of the Inn.
