TABLE OF CONTENTS. : : PAGE : Lord Justice Knight Bruce (with Portrait) Right Honourable Stephen Lushington, the 66 : THE BUILDERS OF OUR LAW DURING QUEEN VICTORIA'S REIGN. LORD COTTENHAM. WHEN her late Gracious Majesty ascended the throne, the holder of the Great Seal was Lord Cottenham. He was of the elder branch of the same Cambridgeshire family, from which Samuel Pepys, the immortal diarist, was descended. Yet it would be difficult to find two greater contrasts than the "cold and sedate" Charles Christopher Pepys and the "gossipy pleasure loving" Samuel. If they had anything in common, it was the faculty of getting on. Young Campbell, who was then in Mr. Tidd's chambers, writes to his father in 1802: "There is a society among the pupils which meets once a week exclusively for the discussion of questions of law. It is modelled upon the plan of the Courts of Westminster—a chief justice, counsel for the plaintiff and defendant, &c. The great ornament of our bar is a Mr. Pepys, a nephew of Sir Lucas." "Slow rises worth," however, at the Chancery Bar, especially with a man whose parts, like Pepys, were rather solid than brilliant. Though a pupil of Tidd and Samuel Romilly, the most distinguished practitioners of the day, and the glory of a mimic bar, it was twenty-two years after his call before he obtained silk-he was forty before he felt himself in a position to marry. In the usual course of professional ambition, he B |