Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/763

 so. VEEDER: A CENTURY OF JUDICATURE 749 diction is the creation of the nineteenth century. While the main stream of legal business flowed through the Inns of Court and Westminster Hall, a close body of advocates and proctors, in the quiet backwaters of Doctors' Commons, under the shadow of St. Paul's, placidly pursued their voca- tion. In their cloister-like seclusion the learned doctors caused scarcely a ripple on the surface of legal affairs ; no report was issued of their proceedings, and to the world at large they were unknown. From this obscurity the ecclesias- tical and admiralty jurisdiction was rescued by the genius of Lord Stowell. The brothers William and John Scott, who were destined in after life, as Lords Stowell and Eldon, to make such last- ing impression on their chosen branches of English juris- prudence, were strikingly dissimilar in mental temperament. The strength of intellect which in the case of Eldon was applied with indefatigable industry to the confinement within rigid limits of the doctrines of a remedial system, was employed by Stowell in laying the foundation of the law of the sea in accordance with the principles of universal justice. Lord Stowell was a man of the most scholarly attainments — the friend of Johnson, Burke and Reynolds, and a keen par- ticipant in the intellectual movements of his time. The cos- mopolitan sources of the civil law, which he originally studied as part of a liberal education — its philosophical, literary and historical associations — led him to adopt it as a voca- tion. The choice was most happy. He had the good fortune to live in an age peculiarly calculated to exercise and exhibit his great faculties. The greatest maritime questions that have ever presented themselves for adjudication arose in his time out of those vast European wars in which England ob- tained the sovereignty of the seas. Most of these questions were of first impression, and could be determined only by a cautious process of deduction from fundamental principles. The genius of Stowell, at once profound and acute, vigorous and expansive, penetrated, mastered and marshalled all the difficulties of these complex inquiries, and framed that com- prehensive chart of maritime law which has become the rule of his successors.