Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/824

 810 V. BENCH AND BAR Court is supreme only in name. The original conception of this court, as a single court in law and equity, was that the contact of minds trained in the different systems would sub- ject the current ideas and tendencies of the rival systems to scrutiny, and thereby dispel confusion, explode inveterate fallacies, and give increased clearness and force to principles of permanent value. But here, as in the court of first in- stance, this expectation has not been realized. The Court of Appeal now sits in two divisions, chancery appeals being al-> lotted to one division, common law appeals to the other; and it usually happens that chancery appeals are heard by chan- cery lawyers and common law appeals by lawyers trained in the common law. Nevertheless, this court has given general satisfaction. It is, indeed, as one of its most distinguished members called it, the backbone of the judicial system. The principal judges of the first decade of the court, during the service of Sir George Jessel as master of the rolls (1873-83), were James (to 1881), Baggallay (1875- 85), Bramwell (1876-81), Brett (1876-97), and Cotton (1877-90). Jessel's short service of less than ten years sufficed to give him a place in the narrow circle of great judges. Other judges have been more subtle in intellect, but in swiftness and sureness of apprehension, in grasp of facts, tenacity of mem- ory and healthy superiority to mere precedent, he presented a combination of qualities not to be found to the same degree in any other judge of his time. His quickness of perception amounted almost to intuition. His learning was profound; yet he was no mere follower of precedent, no mere directory of cases. He was able to take up the confused mass of the law and mould it to the ends of justice. No matter what the subject under discussion was — and no branch of the law seemed unfamiliar to him — he was alike clear, practical and profound. Such achievements are possible only to a man gifted with the swiftest apprehension and the most ample and tenacious memory. It was these faculties which enabled him to deal with such extraordinary sagacity with facts, however numerous and complicated, and to deliver occasionally those judgments in which the statement of facts gives at once the