Vol. VI.
No. 7.
BOSTON.
July, 1894.
LORD COLERIDGE. By John Storer Cobb. BY the death of the Lord Chief Justice of England, the Bench of that country has lost one of its most cultured and conspicu ous members. Not that others have not equalled, and perhaps excelled him in one or other of the qualities which distinguished him, but that in no one whom I can call to mind has there been a union of such qualities, each in so high a degree. In his grasp of the philosophical principles of juris prudence he was probably the equal of any judge that England ever had. This may be called a family characteristic, and links him by more than blood relationship with his great uncle, who, with Southey and Words worth, formed the trinity of the great " Lake Poets." Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an orator, a metaphysician, and a poet, and each of no mean order. His natural talents were such that, even during his school-boy days, Charles Lamb said of him that he was one "to whom the casual passer through the cloisters listened entranced with admiration, as he unfolded in deep and sweet intonations the mysteries of Iamblichus or Plotinus, or recited the Greek of Homer and Pindar." With a genius almost equal to that of Aristotle, he simply drifted from one species of intellectual activity to another without accomplishing ought in any. Nature seemed to have denied to him a will, so that he became utterly lost amid the profundities of the abstruse studies upon which his active, restless, undisciplined brain had ever a
tendency to lay hold. The little youthful energy that he had, he was not able to retain, so that in after life he could not even carry on a conversation towards any denned object. The nephew inherited many of the valu able qualities which distinguished the uncle, not indeed in so high a degree, but there was united with them a will which enabled its possessor to make his mark in the line of life to which his talents were devoted. This important factor in his success he would appear to have inherited from both his father and his mother. The former, Sir John Taylor Coleridge, was, as a judge, distinguished for the patience and ability with which he unravelled the tangled complexi ties of cases that were brought to his court; the courtesy with which he treated all who came before him; the grasp of principles underlying the technicalities which formed the gist of legal phraseology'; and the impartiality with which he pronounced his decisions. Most of these qualities he transmitted to his son, who was one of the most learned, thoughtful, and carefully industrious advo cates of his day, and who, after he was elevated to the Bench, knew how to express in good English the results at which he had arrived in his investigation of the particular case in question. Before he became a judge he had reached distinction in the world of letters and of politics, and with his versatility it is probable that he would have attained
