he goes on to say need not be injurious to health. be sickening, though not in a medical sense."

"A smell may

Kekewich v. Manning (1 De G. M. & G. 176) is another decision always identified with Knight Bruce. To appreciate its importance we must remember that Lord Eldon had long before laid down the principle that there is no equity to perfect an imperfect gift. Pushed to its logical result the principle might operate yery unfairly. Thus, if A. is trustee of a fund for B. for life with remainder to C. and C. makes a voluntary assignment to D., D. would acquire no title, for the assignment is not complete, wanting the legal estate. Kekewich v. Manning qualifies the principle in a very sensible and obvious way by laying down that it is enough if the donor has done all in his power to pass the property.

Prince Albert v. Strange (2 De G. & Sm. 652, affirmed 1 M. & G. 25), is always cited as a leading case in copyright law. The defendant Strange had become possessed of copies (taken in breach of trust) of etchings made by the Queen and Prince Consort for their own amusement, and relating to the most private matters of their life. These Strange proposed to exhibit in a public gallery without the Queen and Prince Albert's consent (much indeed against their wishes), and he began by publishing a descriptive catalogue. It was a monstrous invasion of royal privacy, but it had one good result, it elicited from ViceChancellor Knight Bruce a most able and exhaustive judgment which may be summed up by saying that he held the portfolio as much entitled to protection as the writing table.

The Court of Chancery has gone very far in establishing precatory trusts, but it has never gone farther than Vice-Chancellor Knight Bruce and Lord Truro went in Briggs v. Penny (3 De G. & Sm. 525; 3 M. & G. 546), when they found a trust in the words of a testatrix, "Well knowing that she (the legatee) will make a good use and dispose of it in a manner in accordance with my (testatrix) views and wishes." It is instructive to compare Jessel, M.R.'s remarks in Stead v. Mellor (5 Ch. Div. 225) with Briggs v. Penny, and note how the tide has turned on the subject of precatory trusts.

In Re Cumming (1 De G. M. & G. 557), the Lord Justice energetically vindicates the right of an alleged lunatic to traverse the inquisition. "It is the right," he says, "of an English person to

require that the free use of his property and personal freedom shall not be taken from him on the ground of alleged lunacy, without his being allowed the opportunity of establishing his sanity or denying his insanity before a jury, as a contesting party, not merely as a subject of inquiry."

In Burgess's anchovy case (3 De G. M. & G. 896), in which the two brothers Burgess, sons of the original inventor of the sauce, were the litigants, the brother to whom the sauce business had been left complained of the other vending the sauce, and the Lord Justice begins his judgment thus: "All the Queen's subjects are entitled to manufacture pickles and sauces, and not the less so that their fathers have done it before them. All the Queen's subjects are entitled to use their own name, and not the less so that their fathers have done it before them." Given these propositions, the plaintiff, fraud apart, had no case. Barrow v. Barrow (5 De G. M. & G. 182) is another highly characteristic judgment of his. Lord Selborne in his Autobiography gives it as his opinion that the Lord Justice's judgments "suffered as contributions to the science of law from the strong marks of his personality impressed on them—that they had too great a flavour of rhetoric." But is not the saying of George Herbert true of the law, A jest may find him who a sermon flies."

The Lord Justice was a fastidious critic of language, as a lawyer ought to be. Hence the accuracy which characterises his statement of the law. Hence, too, the epigrammatic vigour of his phrases. (a) "The decree in this case (borrowing by an extravagant infant) "is a matter of course unless the court and the laws of this country are to be reconstructed with a view to this particular case." "The light of justice is waning in August." The ornamental portion of the prospectus." "There are callings in which to be convicted of literature is dangerous" (was the learned judge thinking of the Bar?). "Some breaches of good manners are breaches of law also." "I should like to see the man bold enough to affirm that a young lady of seventeen is

(a) He was indeed a born epigrammist. The following will be familiar to most:

"The curate's eyes our ladies praise.
I never see their light divine.

He always shuts them when he prays,
And when he preaches closes mine."

not doli capax." "Men may be honest without being lawyers, and there are doings from which instinct without learning may make them recoil."

To how many lawsuits might not the following remarks from Ex parte Banks (2 De G. M. & G. 937) apply. It was a quarrel over a plumber's bill-a trumpery question of £5-yet upon this, upon a matter," as the Vice-Chancellor says, "that if they had not good sense enough to settle it for themselves, some respectable neighbour would probably upon application have adjusted for them in an hour, began the career of cost, and heat, and hatred, of reproach, scandal, and misery in which they are now engaged, of which neither this day nor this year will, I fear, see the end, and which seems to exemplify an old English saying, that the mother of mischief is no bigger than a midget's wing."

"Truth, like all other good things, may be loved unwisely, may be pursued too keenly, may cost too much; and surely the meanness and the mischief of prying into a man's confidential consultations with his legal adviser, the general evil of diffusing reserve, dissimulation, uneasiness, and suspicion are too great a price to pay for truth itself": Pearse v. Pearse (1 De G. & Sm. 25-6, 28, 30).

Perhaps the most interesting, certainly the most racy of his judgments, is to be found in Thomas v. Roberts (3 D. & Sm. 758), commonly known as "The Agapemone Case." It was an application to remove a child of four from the guardianship of his father. This gentleman, Mr. Thomas, had joined a new religious sect, led by a prophet of the name of Prince, and had become engaged to a young lady of property, also a believer at the time, but who afterwards fell away. The following letter, written a few weeks before marriage, speaks volumes for this gentleman's character. "My beloved Agnes," he writes, "you mentioned your desire to have a settlement of your property upon yourself. This, I assured you, would be very agreeable to my feelings, and is so still; but last night, waiting on God, this matter was quite unexpectedly brought before me. I had entirely put it away from my thoughts, leaving it to take its course as you might be led to act, but God will not have it so. He shows me that the principle is entirely contrary to God's word," &c., &c. Mr. Thomas was not only impressed with the impiety of marriage settlements, but thought it right to desert his wife and go and live with the prophet at the Agapemone, "a sort of spiritual boarding

house," as the Vice-Chancellor calls it, for both sexes, at Bridgewater. In the result the Vice-Chancellor said he would as lief let the child go to the Agapemone as "consign him to a camp of gypsies." The whole judgment is in a fine vein of sustained

sarcasm.

BARON PARKE-LORD WENSLEYDALE.

Baron Parke is a unique figure among our English judges. He Iwas what is known as a "black-letter lawyer," that is, a man impressed with a profound, and may we not add, a just reverence for the wisdom of the ancient sages of our law, a man who stood, too, on the ancient ways. He loved the law," said Baron Bramwell, in alluding to his death (he told a lady once when he was late at a party that he could not tear himself away from a beautiful demurrer "), "he loved the law, and like others who do so, he looked with some distrust on proposals to change it." "Think of the state of the record," he said when it was proposed to allow amendment of pleadings. We smile, but it would be wrong to set down the utterance of the grand old judge to a perverse preference for technicality over justice, or call his ideas, as another learned judge did, "awful crotchets." He, like others, firmly believed that the interests of justice were best served by a strict adherence to technical rules. There is a merry tale told that once he was summoned to advise the Lords, and in the midst of the argument was suddenly seized with a fainting fit. Cold water, hartshorn, and other restoratives were applied, but they had no effect. At length an idea occurred to one of his brethren, who well knew his peculiar temperament, and he immediately acted on it. He rushed into the library, seized a large musty volume of the old statutes, came back and applied it to the nostrils of the patient. The effect was marvellous. He at once opened his eyes, gave them a slight rub, and in a few seconds he was as well as ever.

On another occasion a legal friend of his was ill, and Parke went to his bedside, taking with him a special demurrer which had been submitted to him. "It was so exquisitely drawn," he said, “that he felt sure it must cheer the patient to read it."

Parke was an instance of a man who owed his success to sheer