Essays Critical And Narrative PDF Download

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1874 edition. Excerpt: ... THE JUDGES OF ENGLAND} 'Quarterly Review, ' 1866. We congratulate Mr. Foss on the completion of his long and arduous task, which he has performed with the accuracy of an historian and the conscientious industry of an antiquary. He has produced a work which is a biographical dictionary in itself, containing not less than 1589 lives. We confess that when we first saw the announcement of his intention to write the lives of all the Judges, we had some misgivings as to the success of his plan. Lord Chancellors and Chief Justices are men who occupy so prominent a position that their career is often interwoven with the history of their country; and some of them, like Glanville, Bacon, Coke, Clarendon, Hale, Somers, Holt, Hardwicke, Mansfield, Erskine, Eldon, have left behind them an imperishable name. But of the puisnes the great mass were mere lawyers, whose lives, even if there were materials for writing them, must be as dull and uneventful as those of town-clerks or aldermen. What could be said that would be worth the telling? Immersed in the routine of their daily duties--oracles of the common law, but untinctured by scholarship and unilluminated by genius--they impressed no mark on their day and generation, and passed noiselessly away; with nothing to commemorate their existence except perhaps a pompous epitaph in some village church, which attests how learned a lawyer and how forgotten 1 I. The fudges of England; with and Solicitor Generals of each reign Misccllaneons Notices connected with the from the Institution of those Offices. To Courts at Westminster, from the time of which is prefixed an Alphabetical List of the Conquest to the Present Time. By all the Judges during the same period, Edward Foss, F.S.A., of the Inner distinguishing..