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The Bench and the Bar, by the Author of 'random Recollections'.
The Bench and the Bar by the Author of 'random Recollections' Author:James Grant General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1837 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: 56 CHAPTER II. LATELY DECEASED JUDGES. LORD ERSKINE LORD ELLENBOROUGH MR. BARON GRAHAM -- LORD TENTERDEN. Let not my readers be alarmed: I am not about to give such a latitude of interpretation to the word " late," as will take them back to the days of Sir Thomas More, Lord Bacon, the Earl of Clarendon, Sir Matthew Hale, or indeed to any of those other distinguished judicial characters who have flourished at much more recent periods. I shall confine myself to men who have presided in our courts of law since the beginning of the present century, and shall only cursorily advert to such even of them ashave been, by some means or other, brought prominently before the public, I may just premise, that in this series of sketches of the " Bench and the Bar," my observations and anecdotes will be strictly original, in every instance in which there is nothing stated which would imply an obligation to other authorities. I do not know that I could begin with a more appropriate name than that of Mr. Thomas Erskine, afterwards Lord Erskine, Mr. Erskine was for many years without an equal at the English bar, and perhaps he has never, taken all in all, had a superior, as counsel, in our courts of law. He was one of the many instances to be found in the annals of the bar, in which a man suddenly rises from obscurity into the full blaze of popularity. Until employed as counsel for a Captain Bailie, who was the defendant in an action before the court in which he then practised, he was altogether unknown at the bar, though he had been some short time called to it. The effect which his speech on that occasion produ...« less