The Death of Lord Coleridge. — The death of the Lord Chief Justice of England does not come as a surprise to those American lawyers who have read the recent London law journals and noted their comments on the palpable failure of his physical powers. He was not an old man, as that term has grown to be understood in regard to public men in England, and he had a powerful frame, so that one naturally expected to see him occupying the second judicial post of England for ten years to come. He was a- remarkable example of a very great success without shining talents. The talents which he had, in our judgment, would have been better fitted to and earned a greater reputation in politics than in the law. He was pre-eminently a man of affairs and of society. He would have been a model ambassa dor at a foreign court, or an arbitrator of an interna tional dispute. He certainly was not a great lawyer, either at the bar or on the bench. He could not have been ranked with Russell as an advocate nor with several of his contemporaries as a judge of an appellate court. In fact, he seemed to be very modest in this regard, for he told an American lawyer that he and all his associates, when engaged in con sultation on a legal question with Jessel, "felt like children " in comparison with that giant. But from what we have seen and heard of him in his judicial career, we have drawn the conclusion that he was of exceeding merit at trial terms. Here his ready fa miliarity with the ordinary questions, his good temper, his fairness, his sound common sense, and his unfail ing composure and courtesy, must have rendered him a remarkably acceptable and useful magistrate. The "rough side" of Jessel's tongue was tolerated because of his wonderful legal genius; the smooth side of Coleridge's readily induced the Bar to overlook his lack of the legal learning and logical grasp which have been displayed by many of his predecessors. If we were called on to designate his leading charac teristics we should say they were tact and good sense. It was these that enabled him to make his extended tour in this country without saying or doing anything but the right thing, and to win the respect and ad miration of all the lawyers with whom he came in social contact and all the audiences which he ad dressed. His information in respect to this country was large and uniformly accurate. He told the writer of these lines that he owed this in great meas ure to a forty years' correspondence with a bishop residing here. Lord Coleridge was a warm friend to this country and an admirer of much in her polity and society. The keenness of his observation on his travels was very noticeable. He was not a dreamer or theorist, but an observer and actor. So he made his influence felt for good in measures of legal re form. He had a good-natured contempt of cant and
pedantic and worn-out form, and did much to bring in the reign of the practical and useful in the realm of the law. No American lawyer can ever forget his humorous creation of the department of special-plead ing curiosities in Yellowstone Park, where he arrayed the ancient subtilties of the law with the remains of the pre-Adamite monsters of natural history. Lord Coleridge was a man of keen humor and was charm ing in companionship, — a redoubtable story-teller, and withal a good listener. He was not in the least a monologist, like his great relative, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and he had not a bit of his metaphysical nonsense. We should say that he excelled all his judicial contemporaries in his power and mode of pre senting all he knew, not only in the matter of tact and address, but also in oratory and rhetoric. His scholarship was extensive and accurate, and he loved letters. Everything he wrote or spoke was adorned by the presence of the literary faculty. This came to him by inheritance and association. The poet Coleridge was his great-uncle (we believe), and his father, judge of the common pleas, and his brother were excellent classical scholars and had something of the poetic faculty. Everything that Lord Cole ridge said or spoke was couched in the most elegant and attractive form. He has been, we dare say, on the whole quite as useful a chief magistrate, by reason of his rather unusual endowments, as he would have proved had he been more learned in the precedents of law, stronger in his mental grasp, and ruder in his judicial deportment. There is a certain strength of gentleness, culture and elegance, such as George William Curtis possessed, which, united to wit, sense and judgment such as Lord Coleridge had, affords the basis of a respectable career.
Great Men and Little Men. — Many years ago an aristocratic Dutch lawyer and judge of the Hudson Valley, who was of predominant stature, objected to the elevation of an old rival of his to the bench on the somewhat singular ground that he was " such a very 1-i-t-t-l-e man." The little man, however, was a very excellent judge for more than a quarter of a century, and we are inclined to believe was a rather more use ful judge than his big contemporary. Quite recently, on the occasion of the address to the graduating class of the Buffalo Law School by Mr. William B. Hornblower, of New York, one of the rejected nominees to the office of Supreme Court Justice, a lawyer, in conversation with the present writer, while he ad mitted the eminent intellectual fitness of Mr. Hornblower for that post, remarked that he could not help thinking that it would have been better to nominate a man whose stature should more closely have corre-
