the time of Henry IV at a wharf in Southwark, and in the time of Henry VIII at Orton's Quay, near London Bridge. In 1597 part of the Church of St. Margaret-onthe-Hill was used, and here it was that Pepys attended the sittings of the court. The en try in his Diary gives us a characteristic portrait: "To St. Margaret's Hill in Southwark, where the Judge of the Admiralty come and the rest of the Doctors of the Civil law, and some other commissioners, whose commission of over and terminer was read and then the charge given by Dr. Exton, which we thought was somewhat dull, though he would seem to intend it to be very rhetor ical, saying that justice had two wings, one of which spread itself over the land and the other over the water, which was this admi ralty court. I perceive that this court is but yet in its infancy, and their design and con sultation was—I could overhear them—how to proceed with the most solemnity and spend time, there being only two businesses to do, which of themselves could not spend much time." The court finally established its local habitation at Doctors' Commons under the shadow of St. Paul's, where all matters governed by the civil and canon law thereafter centered. While the main stream of legal business flowed through the Inns of Court and West minster Hall, here in the quiet backwaters of the Doctors' Commons the College of Advocates placidly pursued their scholastic vocation for more than two centuries. In 1672 the College itself .was entirely rebuilt. It contained a dining hall, a garden, a fine library of civil and canon law, a quadrangle formed by the chambers and residences of the doctors, and a handsome court where the scarlet robed advocates sat in a raised semi circle, the judge in the midst of them, while the proctors occupied a table below. In their cloiser-like seclusion the learned doctors caused scarcely a ripple on the surface of legal affairs; no report was issued of their proceedings, and to the world at large they were unknown. From this obscurity the
ecclesiastical and admiralty jurisdiction was rescued by the genius of Lord Stowell. The brothers William and John Scott, who were destined in after life, as Lord Stowell and Lord Eldon, to make such lasting im pression on their chosen branches of English jurisprudence, were strikingly dissimilar in mental temperament. The strength of in tellect which in the case of Lord Eldon was applied with indefatigable industry to the confinement within rigid limits of the doc trines of a remedial system, was employed by Lord Stowell in laying the foundation of the law of the sea in accordance with the principles of universal justice. Lord Stowell was a man of the most schol arly attainments, the friend of Johnson, Burke and Reynolds, and in touch with the intellectual movements of his time. The cosmopolitan sources of the civil law, which he originally studied as part of a liberal edu cation—its philosophical, literary and his torical associations—led him to adopt it as a vocation. The choice was most happy. He had the good fortune to live in an age peculiarly calculated to exercise and exhibit his great faculties. The greatest mari time questions that have ever presented themselves for adjudication arose in his time out of those great European wars in which England obtained the sovereignty of the seas. Most of these questions were of first im pression, and could be determined only by a cautious process of deduction from funda mental principle. The genius of Stowell, at once profound and acute, vigorous and expansive, penetrated, mastered and mar shalled all the difficulties of these complex inquiries, and framed that great comprehen sive chart of maritime law which has become the rule of his successors and the admiration of the world. His first judicial service was performed as judge of the Consistory Court of London, where for ten years he delivered discourses on the regulation of the domestic form which would have excited the admiration of Addison for their taste and of Johnson for their
