James McMullen Rigg

“ As a lawyer he was distinguished not less by his strict integrity and delicate sense of honour than by his immense industry, knowledge, and sagacity, disdaining while at the bar the common tricks of the advocate, refusing to argue cases which he thought bad, using rhetoric sparingly, and only in support of what he deemed solid argument. On one occasion, while he was lord chief baron, a duke is said to have called at his chambers to explain to him a case then pending. Hale dismissed him unheard with a sharp reprimand. ”

“ Anthony à Wood says of Digges that ‘his understanding few could equal, his virtues fewer would.’ He adds that his death was considered a ‘public calamity.’ This is certainly exaggerated eulogy. Whatever may have been Digges's virtues, political integrity can hardly have been among them, or he would not have accepted office under the crown at the very crisis of the struggle for freedom. ”

“ He was passionately desirous that the policy of religious equality should at length have a fair trial in England. At the same time, he saw that the case of the fellows was very hard; and he sought to break unpleasant news to them as gently as possible, and even to console Dr. Hough for the certain loss of the headship by an airy vision of lawn sleeves. ”

“ Jessel brought to the practice of the law the aptitudes of a man of business; a logical faculty naturally acute and sharpened by severe discipline; a knowledge of English law none the less wide, profound, and minute because he had found time to master the general principles of the Roman law and the modern codes founded thereon, and could estimate more justly than most Englishmen the relative merits and defects of the two systems. ”

“ In this revolution Penn acquiesced with a good grace, and exerted himself to compose a feud which had become chronic between the province and the territories. In this, as also in an attempt to pass bills introducing marriage among the negro slaves now held in large numbers by the settlers, and for the protection of the Indian population, he failed. He passed, however, an act extending the benefit of criminal justice to the slaves. While thus striving to mitigate the evils of slavery he did not scruple to hold slaves himself, though he made provision by his will for their manumission. ”

“ The interception of a letter from James II to Penn shortly before William III left for Ireland (June 1690) occasioned his citation before the privy council. He appealed to the king, urging the manifest injustice of imputing disloyalty to him merely because James had chosen to write to him, and protesting his entire innocence of treasonable practices. William, who knew him well, was satisfied, and would have discharged him, but the council held him to bail. Macaulay's imputation of ‘falsehood’ on this occasion is entirely arbitrary. ”

“ Jenkins lacked resource and independence of mind, was a great stickler for forms, and, according to Temple, was in an agony when left alone at Nymwegen. On the other hand, his knowledge of the civil law and diplomatic usage was very great, his industry was indefatigable, and his loyalty unimpeachable. Roger North calls him ‘the most faithful drudge of a secretary that ever the court had.’ He was a stiff churchman, a sincere believer in the divine right of kings, and of an exemplary life. ”

“ The Irish house resolved that Gilbert and his colleagues in the court of exchequer were ‘betrayers of his majesty's prerogative,’ and committed them to the custody of the usher of the black rod. Thereupon the English house resolved that the barons had ‘acted with courage according to law in support of his majesty's prerogative, and with fidelity to the crown of Great Britain,’ and ordered that an address should be presented to his majesty recommending them for special distinction. ”

“ As long as Lord Hardwicke presided in the king's bench, Lee's functions were almost entirely reduced to expressing his concurrence with the decisions of his chief; it was only as chief justice that he had scope to display to full advantage his thorough and minute knowledge of the common law and his strict judicial integrity. His name is associated with few cases of public interest. He decided, however, that a female householder is entitled to vote for, and eligible to serve as, the sexton of a parish, and thus laid the foundation of the parochial and municipal franchises of women ”

“ The former work was little less than an unqualified panegyric upon Norway, whose free, industrious, and enterprising peasant proprietors Laing, a strong and somewhat doctrinaire radical of the old school, painted as patterns of native virtue; in the latter he denounced the union of Sweden and Norway as a flagitious act, inveighed against the privileged nobility and priesthood of Sweden as destitute alike of public spirit and private virtue, and denounced the entire nation as the most immoral in Europe. ”

“ As a soldier the duke never had an opportunity of gaining high distinction, and his pedantic, almost superstitious, insistence upon minutiæ of military etiquette, discipline, dress, and equipments, made him unpopular in the army. He was, however, the first to abandon flogging and to establish a regimental school. He was extremely regular in his habits, a model of punctuality and despatch in the discharge of duty, and sincerely pious. He was a knight of the orders of the Garter, Bath, and St. Patrick, and a knight grand cross of the Bath and of the order of the Guelphs. ”

“ The tension between the House of Commons and the court of queen's bench was then extreme. Wilde was prepared for the most violent measures, and, though his excessive zeal was curbed on the whole by the attorney-general [see Campbell, John, first Baron Campbell] , he was not to be withheld from opposing the legislative settlement of the question on the pedantic ground that it involved a tacit waiver of the privilege that it affirmed. Of the privileges of his own order he was no less jealous than of those of the House of Commons. ”

“ The king suddenly became a popular hero, and Handel composed a Te Deum in honour of the occasion. The moment seemed favourable for diplomatic action, and accordingly George, with the help of Carteret, who had accompanied him to the field, attempted to arrange a treaty by which the emperor should renounce his claims on the Austrian succession, permit the Grand Duke of Tuscany to be crowned king of the Romans, and withdraw from the French alliance, in consideration of being guaranteed peaceful possession of Bavaria, his imperial title, and an annual subsidy from England. ”

“ Marriage brought Ann no relief from spiritual distress. Her health became seriously impaired, and four children to whom she gave birth died in infancy. At length she discovered that celibacy was the holy state, and in 1770 was sent to prison as a sabbath-breaker for preaching this new gospel. She was confined, according to the shaker tradition, in a dungeon, and kept for a fortnight with no food except milk and 'other liquids,' conveyed to her through the stem of a tobacco-pipe placed in the keyhole by one of her adherents. ”

“ He is clear that knowledge begins with the individual, and that the universal is reached by a process of abstraction. By abstraction, however, he does not mean merely the process of denuding a perception of all but its particular elements, which, since all in his view are particular, would result in nothing at all, but the process of noting points of agreement and neglecting differences. ”

“ The despatches which Gerard sent to Walsingham soon after his arrival in Ireland give a very lively picture of the state of affairs there. A great part of the country, he reports, ‘is depopulated, and the most of the inhabitants in the other parts so wretched, poor creatures, in person and substance as not to be able to defend themselves.’ The ‘poor churls’ are wasted and impoverished by a ‘multitude of idle thieves.’ His ‘plot’ is to get these hanged, which can only ‘be put in execution by circuiting the Pale’ twice a year. ”

“ He found time, however, to make himself no mean classical scholar. After his father's death he carried on the banking business with eminent success, was a preacher, and otherwise a man of great influence among the Friends. Though debarred from public offices by his religious principles, he was universally respected as a citizen, and was one of the pioneers of the movement for the emancipation of the West Indian slaves, a supporter of the Bible Society and of unsectarian education, and one of the founders of the Birmingham General Hospital. ”

“ Passion overcometh me. I can write no more. Love me, for I love you.’ He signs himself her ‘most happy bondman, Lyddes.’ She also called him her ‘mutton,’ her ‘bellwether,’ her ‘pecora campi.’ Malignant gossip said that he was her paramour, and the Queen of Scots, in a letter written to Elizabeth from Sheffield in November 1584, roundly taxes her with the fact. ”

“ Colonel Lane accordingly determined to remove his sister to France, and, disguised as peasantfolk, they made their way on foot from Bentley Hall to Yarmouth, where they took ship for the continent in December. Arrived there they threw off their disguise and posted to Paris, having sent a courier in advance to apprise Charles of their approach. Charles came from Paris to meet them, accompanied by Henrietta Maria and the Dukes of York and Gloucester, and gallantly saluting Jane Lane on the cheek, called her his ‘life’ and bade her welcome to Paris. ”

“ Horse and foot alike were in the prime of life, inured to every kind of hardship in the French wars, and admirably disciplined. Five lances composed a company, five companies a troop, and every ten lances had usually a separate officer. For their raiding expeditions the White Company usually chose the night, when they would burst like a deluge upon a town, massacre the men, violate the women, carry off whatever was valuable and portable, and set fire to what they left behind. At other times they would content themselves with levying contributions. ”

“ His elevation to the bench coincided with the commencement of a new era in the history of English law. The first Judicature Act had just been passed; the first step taken towards the fusion of law and equity into one harmonious system. It did not come into operation until 1 Nov. 1875, when it was linked with an amending and extending act, one of the clauses of which reconstituted the court of appeal and made the master of the rolls an ex-officio member of it. By virtue of his office the master of the rolls had precedence next after the lord chief justice. ”

“ The English peerage accordingly became extinct. The earl by his will had entailed his estates upon the issue of his son Arthur, whose right to the Irish titles was reinvestigated on the petition of John Annesley of Ballysax, Esq., but was confirmed, and who in 1793 was created Earl of Mountnorris. This title has, however, since become extinct, the present Viscount Valentia and Baron Mountnorris being the lineal descendant of the sixth son of the first viscount. The family derives its name from Annesley, in Nottingshire, where it is supposed to have been settled before the conquest. ”

“ The pretensions of Bratton Clovelly seem to rest entirely upon the fact that anciently it was known as Bracton. Sir Travers Twiss, in his edition of Bracton's great work, 'De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliæ,' inclines in favour of Bratton Fleming on the ground that one Odo de Bratton was perpetual vicar of the church there in 1212 (Rot. Lit. Pat. i. 93 b) , when the rectory was conferred on William de Ralegh, a justice itinerant, whose roll, with that of Martin de Pateshull, Bracton is known to have had in his possession almost certainly for the purposes of his work. ”

“ Wherein the certainty of the Christian Religion is demonstrated by infallible proof from the four rules made use of against the Deists,’ dated, with dramatic propriety, on Good Friday, appeared the same year, and both were reprinted in one volume, London, 1699, 12mo. The ‘Method with the Deists’ is nothing if not historical. The miracles are supposed to vouch for the doctrine, and be in their turn vouched for by conformity to four rules of historical evidence, such conformity being assumed sufficient to prove the truth of any alleged ‘matter of fact,’ however extraordinary. ”

“ The emperor appealed to England for help. The king and queen were eager for war on his behalf, and were with the utmost difficulty restrained by Walpole. The king then entered into a negotiation with the view of effecting an alliance between Spain and the emperor. The terms arranged were that the emperor should marry the second archduchess to a Spanish prince, who should succeed to the kingdom of Naples and Sicily on the emperor's death, and that Spain should meanwhile guarantee the integrity of the empire. ”

“ With the story of his committing Prince Henry to prison, and of that prince's magnanimous behaviour towards him on his accession to the throne, it fares still worse. For the committal there is no evidence; the latter part of the story is demonstrably untrue. The committal to gaol for contempt of the heir-apparent to the crown would have been an event of such dramatic interest as could not fail, if it occurred, to have been recorded by some contemporary writer, and duly noted as a precedent by the lawyers. ”

“ The popular realism, which regards objects as material ‘things in themselves,’ together with the popular idea of God as the creator of the world from nothing by successive acts, and its governor through secondary causes and miraculous interpositions, he treats as due to a certain ‘spiritual deadness,’ the intellectual analogue of sin, to which man is prone, and as exploded by scientific materialism, which, however, in its turn is proved by philosophy to have but a relative validity. ”

“ The first general assembly met at Chester on 4 Dec., and in the course of a few days passed Penn's constitution and code into law, with some slight modifications and the addition of penal clauses against profane swearing, blasphemy, adultery, intemperance, and other forms of vice, playgoing, card-playing, and other ‘evil sports and games.’ Notwithstanding its puritanic tinge, the ‘Great Law,’ as the revised code was entitled, was on the whole remarkable for its leniency, murder alone being treated as a capital offence. ”