meaning-it's the glue.' And I was worreted as if I'd got three bells to pull at once when we went into the vestry and they began to sign their names; but the parson he made light of it. 'Pooh, pooh, Macey, make yourself easy,' he says; 'it's neither the meaning nor the words; it's the regester does it that's the glue.'"

MR. JUSTICE WILLES.

CAMPBELL, in his Diary for July, 1855, records: "Mr. Justice Maule has resigned. He is succeeded by a capital hand whom I warmly recommended to the Lord Chancellor-Willes, who is not only an admirable lawyer, but has delightful manners and a wellregulated mind." This is high eulogy coming from that keen critic of men, Lord Campbell.

"It is not too much to say," says a writer in the Law Magazine, "that Mr. Justice Willes was the most learned lawyer of our day"-" a consummate lawyer" is the verdict of Sir Frederick Pollock. It used to be said of Wordsworth, the late Bishop of Lincoln, that he was the only divine who had ever read "The Fathers" through. Willes has the reputation of being the only lawyer who has ever read through the Reports— the whole Reports from the first of the Year-books to the last number of Meeson and Welsby-happily for him he had not to cope with the multiplicity of modern reports-he had certainly a greater knowledge of case law than any man at the Bar, and report said that he had committed to memory all the practical forms of writs occurring and used in common law proceedings. He knew by heart every old term of law, every maxim, every cantilena of our law; and he was not only a profoundly learned lawyer, of whom there have been many, but a scientific lawyer, of which there have been few. Too many English lawyers live, and move, and have their being in a chaotic world of legal rules and technicalities. Willes, in Platonic metaphor, had ascended the mount of vision, and before his philosophic eye the whole domain of jurisprudence lay displayed in ordered beauty. Of him, too, it might with truth be said, as of our great philosophic Chancellor, that he had "taken all knowledge to be his province." There was scarcely a subject on which the judge was not a wellread man, and what he had once read he seemed never to forget.

The classics were his familiar companions down to his latest years. Homer, especially, was his favourite, and was always ready at hand for reference or quotation; and he was one of those, says Sir Frederick Pollock, "whose knowledge is radiant and kindles answering fire." "To set down," he goes on to say, "all I owe to him is beyond my means. From Willes I learnt to taste the Year-books and to pursue the history of the law in authorities which were collectively and compendiously despised as 'black letter.'" It was Willes, too, who suggested and inspired Sir Frederick's admirable treatise on the "- Law of Torts." Thus is perpetuated the spiritual lineage—the apostolic succession of the law.

Cork is a city fruitful in lawyers and learned men; it has given many judges to the Irish Bench, but it has no worthier alumnus than Bernard Shaw Willes. But Willes was one, like Burke, "born for the universe," and he gravitated, as so many brilliant young Irishmen do, to London, and settled down to "live laborious days" in the chambers of Chitty, the celebrated pleader. In those days unassisted merit had still a chance, and Willes, though he had no connection of any sort, except what he had made for himself by his legitimate exertions, got rapidly into business, and soon acquired a great reputation among his contemporaries. It was in Westminster Hall that he chiefly shone. In arguing demurrers and special cases even the great Parke owned his skill and disdained not to cross swords with him. He was not much seen on circuit. He was, as he himself said when once proposing prosperity to the Home Circuit, a town mouse rather than a country mouse."

"It was his practice," so a friend relates in the Solicitors' Journal, "after working up till a late hour at night, to take a walk in the Temple Gardens, a habit which was shared by the late Mr. T. W. Smith, the learned author of the Leading Cases. It was in these midnight walks that these two distinguished lawyers first formed an acquaintance which soon ripened into intimacy, both being, indeed, kindred spirits, for the late Mr. Smith was a man of extraordinary wide and varied culture. These walks, which were frequently prolonged into the small hours of the morning, became a fixed custom, and possibly had a share in precipitating the disease which caused the untimely death of Mr. Smith. At his request Willes consented to undertake the third edition of Smith's Leading Cases,' only stipulating that Mr.

Keating, who was also Mr. Smith's intimate friend and executor, should be joined in the task." But his reputation, though rising at the common law bar, had not yet reached the remote precincts of Lincoln's Inn, and he, like Pitt, had to suffer for the crime of being a young man, and a rather positive young man. Serjeant Robinson relates how in one case at a conference with his two leaders Sir Richard Bethell and Serjeant Hayes, of witty memory, young Willes had the temerity to differ from his two seniors, and to give his reasons at some length. "Well, Serjeant Hayes," said the sarcastic Bethell, we have come to a clear opinion on this case, and this young-I forget his name (referring to the back of his brief). Ah! I see, Mr. Wills, or Willes, or some such appellation-I understand differs from us. Perhaps he will be kind enough to write out the conclusion we have come to and send it to us for our signatures." Willes turned out to be right, but he never quite forgave Bethell for his marked discourtesy. These things sometimes happen still. Willes, however, was not to be snuffed out by a sarcasm. He became Tubman of the Exchequer, an odd but honourable post, and, more flattering still, he was employed with Bramwell to prepare the Common Law Procedure Acts. No better man could possibly have been found for the task. Few men with his mastery of technical detail would have been able to emancipate themselves from its trammels, but his clear sense, while recognising to the full the necessity of distinct and accurate rules, was able to cast aside the useless subtleties and effete technicalities which incumbered the law down to that period. No one less thoroughly familiar with the system which he destroyed could have done the work so completely, but he knew exactly how much was worth retaining and how much ought to be rejected. It is difficult for men trained under the modern system to realise the extent of the revolution which was quietly and effectually brought about by these Acts. The next year saw his elevation to his proper sphere-the Bench. Campbell was then Chief Justice. He enters in his diary: "Much amused and pleased with a scene yesterday in the Queen's Bench. At the sittings of the court my brother Willes presented himself at the extreme right of the Bench to take the oaths. All stood up, judges, barristers, and strangers, with much solemnity. When the judicial juror came to the oaths of abjuration, he did not repeat the words after the officer, who with much emphasis was reading it. I made a private sign to Willes that he should

repeat, but with no effect. At last the words being pronounced by which he ought to have abjured 'the said James and the descendants of the said James,' and he still uttering no sound, I said, 'Brother Willes, you should repeat those words after the officer of the court, that we may know that you abjure King James and his descendants.' Willes, J.: My Lord, I am abjuring them in my mind.' Chief Justice: 'That is not enough, Brother Willes. The statute requires the words to be "spoken by you. Although there be no "Pretender," and there have long ceased to be any "descendants of the said James," you are bound with a loud voice to abjure them. I am sorry that the law should require such a farce, but while the law exists the farce must be played.' Brother Willes then repeated the remainder of the oath to the end of it and kissed the book. "The abjuration oath,” adds Campbell, "certainly is a monstrous profanation which ought now to be done away with. We may safely trust to the simple oath of allegiance."

"Oh! Plato, Plato!" exclaimed the Emperor Julian when he was going through his martial exercises, "what an occupation for a philosopher." When the Inns of Court Volunteers were formed in 1859 Willes, with characteristic sense of duty, though then on the Bench, joined as a private, and continued to serve in its ranks till shortly before his death, nor is it recorded of him that he uttered any sentiment at all equal to that of Julian, or deemed it in the least derogatory to his dignity to drill with the Devil's Own. Did not the late Lord Justice Cotton go to parade with his appointment as Lord Justice in his pocket? But truth will out, and the story runs that Sergeant-Major Dod, of that redoubtable corps, with soldierly bluntness, once remarked that Willes might be "a dd good judge, but he was a dd bad drill.”

It must have been in this capacity that Sir Frederick Pollock apostrophises him as "a wise and valiant judge." Wise he assuredly was. In no judge had the mercantile community greater confidence. They knew that he was thoroughly acquainted with commercial law, and would apply it in a wise and liberal spirit.

An old Scotch judge being asked how he prepared his judgments replied, "Oh! I just read over the pleadings and let them wamble in my wame with the whiskey for twa or three days, and then I gie my ain interlocutor." This was not Willes' way. In all his admirable judgments, extending over a period of seventeen