Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/724

 710 V. BENCH AND BAR nor a single known instance of a corrupt decision. The overwhelming importance of the House of Commons has since 1688 given the great prizes of the profession to law- yers who have been useful to their party in Parliament. The regular preferment for an able lawyer has been from a seat in the Commons to the solicitor-generalship, then to the attorney-general's place, and finally to the chiefship of one of the law courts or to the office of Lord Chancellor. But the professional and political preferment has invariably come as the reward, not the cause, of professional eminence. Lord Somers, Sir John Holt, Lord Talbot, and Lord Hard- wicke were very great lawyers before they received any political reward. Later Mansfield, Thurlow, Eldon, Erskine, Loughborough, Melville, and Ellenborough had become lead- ers of the bar, before they entered upon a parliamentary career. In the last century, Lyndhurst, Brougham, Tenter- den, Cottenham, Denman, Campbell, Westbury, Cockburn, Selborne, Cairns, Coleridge, and Russell all gained their professional and judicial preferment by great legal attain- ments. The office of Master of the Rolls has been consid- ered one of the great professional rewards ; but the puisne judges in the various common law courts, and later the vice- chancellors, and still later the lords justices of appeal, have not had any immediate connection with parliamentary life. The wealth of information which we have in regard to lawyers and judges after the Revolution enables us to see far more clearly than in the case of the older judges the characters of the various great lawyers.^ But no doubt the same phenomena are noticeable in the preferment of lawyers to the bench that we should find in the earlier cen- turies if we had more accurate information. The race has not always been to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Often a leather-lunged, heavy-witted mediocrity, distancing brilliant competitors, has gained a seat upon the bench. Among the judges and lawyers, the same traits we notice to-day were prevalent in these former times. The jealousies among lawyers, the favoritism of judges toward some chosen ' No attempt will be made here to do anything more than indicate the attitude of great lawyers toward reforms in the law.