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 and Turner. He had been engaged for some years to Sarah, daughter of Edward John Teale, solicitor, of Leeds, and they decided to marry on his income of £300 a year. The marriage, which led to many decades of happiness, took place in 1858. During the next year or two practice continued to be slack and the young couple lived in lodgings, but in February 1860 Lindley's work was published under the title, A Treatise on the Law of Partnership, including its application to Companies. The publishers paid £150 clear for an edition of a thousand copies and the author retained the copyright. The book was at once noticed publicly by the judges. In this year his first pupil came to him. Others followed, including (Sir) Frederick Pollock, the well-known jurist, and (Sir) Francis Maclean, afterwards chief justice of Bengal. It is characteristic that Lindley never took more than two pupils at a time, and went through their drafts with them sitting by his side.

In 1866, when the failure of the old-established house of Overend, Gurney & Co. produced a financial crisis in the City, Lindley was the junior for the partners of the firm throughout the subsequent litigation. The year marked the change from a safe to a great practice, and Lindley, with his unfailing good judgement, consolidated his Chancery work by refusing to take briefs in the countless great arbitrations which followed the 1866 debacle. In the same year he received from the lord chief justice, Sir Alexander Cockburn, the office of revising barrister for Middlesex. He only held the appointment for one turn, but, when he became a judge of the common pleas, this experience had prepared him for the appeals in election cases which went to that court. In 1871 the well-known case of Knox v. Gye enhanced his reputation greatly. He appeared for Gye, the manager of the Covent Garden opera. Vice-Chancellor Page Wood had decided against his client, but the decision was reversed by the Court of Appeal and not restored by the House of Lords. This brought further work from theatrical people, including the defendants in an action concerning Frou-frou, in which the owners of the copyright in the novel endeavoured to prevent the performance of the English play which had been based upon it. The defence was that the play was an adaptation and not a translation, and was moreover altered to suit English tastes. In arguing this case Lindley read many pages of French, contrasting them with the English version. The court was crowded and many French and Belgian theatrical performers were present. When it was explained to the foreigners at the close that the defendants had succeeded, the tall Belgian actress who played ‘Frou-frou’ threw her arms around Lindley, exclaiming ‘Mon sauveur! mon sauveur!’ In 1872 Lindley was making £4,500 a year and was ‘terribly overworked’. He took silk on the advice of Sir George Jessel, then solicitor-general, and attached himself to the court of Vice-Chancellor Wickens. At this time one of Wickens's leaders, James Dickinson, Q.C., was seriously ill, and this helped the new silk, who in his first year as a Q.C. made a larger income than in his last year in stuff. In each subsequent year of his practice the position continued to improve. In the autumn of 1874 died the uncle who had been so valued a friend to Lindley throughout his life. He left to his nephew a small house and about sixty acres of land in East Carleton, near Norwich, and also a considerable sum of money. This house became the country home of Lindley and his family. He enlarged it substantially and lived there, at first in vacations and then altogether, until his death.

In May 1875 Lord Chancellor Cairns, to the astonishment of Lindley and of the profession, offered him a judgeship in the common pleas. The Judicature Acts (1872–1875) which were to fuse common law and equity, with the provision that where they differed equity ‘should prevail’, were to come into operation in the following November. The extension of this ‘prevalence’ to appointments caused some perturbation; for neither Lord Cairns nor Lord Selborne had ever given a chancery judgeship to a common law man. While Lindley was naturally hesitating, Mr. Justice Denman, then a stranger, offered to go the coming summer circuit for him, thus giving him time to prepare for criminal work. This encouraged Lindley to accept the post and, as Denman later advised, go the circuit himself and get the novelty over. In less than a week he was sworn in and knighted, was made a serjeant-at-law, and took his seat in the Exchequer Chamber. He was the last person to put the serjeant's black patch upon his wig, and finally the last survivor of that ancient order. He had been twenty-one years at the bar and was forty-six years of age.

Lindley's judicial career lasted for thirty years. Appointed judge of the common pleas in 1875, he was a lord justice of appeal from 1881 to 1897, master of the Rolls from 1897 to 1900, and a lord of 336