THE RT. HON. JAMES BRYCE strength lay. Herein he surpassed the most eminent of contemporary judges the then Master of the Rolls for which Jessel had perhaps a quicker mind than Cairns he had not so wide a mind nor one so thor oughly philosophical in the methods in which it moved." SIR GEORGE JESSEL AS A JUDGE. "The Rollo Court used to present while he (Jessel) presided over it a curious and interesting sight which led young counsel, who had no business to be there to frequent it for the mere sake of watching the judge. When the leading counsel for the plaintiff was opening his case, Jessel listened quietly for the first few minutes only, and then began to address questions to the counsel, at first so as to guide his remarks in a par ticular direction, then so as to start his course altogether and turn his speech into a series of answers to the Judge's interroga tories. When by a short dialogue of this kind, Jessel had possessed himself of the vital facts, he would turn to the leading counsel for the defendant and ask him whether he admitted such and such facts alleged by the plaintiff to be true. If these facts were admitted the Judge pro ceeded to indicate the view he was disposed to take of the law applicable to the facts, and by a few more questions to the counsel on the one side or the other, as the case might be, elicited their respective legal grounds of contention. If the facts were not admitted, it of course became necessary to call the witnesses or read the affidavits — processes which the vigorous impatience of the Judge considerably shortened, for it was a dangerous thing to read to him any irrelevant or loosely drawn paragraph. But more generally his searching questions and the sort of pressure he applied so cut down the issues of fact that there was little or nothing left in the controversy regarding which it was necessary to examine the evidence in detail, since the counsel felt that there was no use in putting before
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him a contention which they could not sustain under the fire of his criticism. Then Jessel proceeded to deliver his opinion and dispose of the case. The affair was from beginning to end far less an argument and counter argument by counsel than an investigation directly conducted by the Judge himself in which the principal func tion of the counsel was to answer the Judge's questions concisely and exactly so that the Judge might as soon as possible get to the bottom of the matter." IN PRAISE OF THE CIVIL LAW THE ROMAN JURIST. A few years after his call to the Bar the Regius Professorship of Civil law at Oxford fell vacant, and Mr. Bryce was appointed to the post. It had peculiar advantages, for it kept the London barrister in touch with University life. At Oxford he could study law in its scientific aspect, at West minster and Lincoln's Inn he watched and worked at its practical administration. The inaugural lecture which he delivered on his appointment is an eloquent plea for the study of the Civil Law — Rome's great gift to the world: "no people ever" he says, "formed so worthy a conception of what law ought to be." "What is it" he goes on to ask, "which we admire in the Roman jurists and in the Roman law generally? The characteristic merits of the Roman law are its reasonableness and its consistency. It is pervaded by a spirit of good sense, except in two depart ments, those of the paternal power and of slavery, its rules almost always conform to considerations of justice and expediency. Very little needs to be excused as the result of historical causes. Even slavery and the patria popestas — the former universal in the ancient world, the latter so deep rooted among the Romans that it could never be altogether expunged — are in the later centuries so steadily and care fully mitigated that most of their old harshness disappears. The moral tone of
