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SIR RICHARD WEBSTER.

THE ENGLISH BENCH AND BAR OF TO-DAY. II. THE ATTORNEY-GENERAL. RICHARD EVERARD WEBSTER, Queen's Counsel, Knight, Member of Parliament for the Isle of Wight, and At torney-General of England, was born in 1842; and was educated at the Charterhouse, Lon don, and afterward at King's College, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge, whence he carried away a Bachelor of Arts degree, thirdclass honors in classics, a fair knowledge of mathematics (he was thirty-fifth wrangler"), the reputation of being the best long-dis tance foot-racer in the University, and the good-will of everybody who had come in contact with him. His father, the late Thomas Webster, Q.C., had been one of the most eminent patentbarristers of his day : the Patent Law

Amendment Act of 1852 was practically his workmanship; his treatise on the Law of Patents is still to be found in every good legal library in England, and his " Reports" of cases are well known on both sides of the Atlantic. With such antecedents, Richard Webster naturally joined the legal profession. He was admitted to the Honorable Society of Lincoln's Inn in 1865, and was duly called to the bar in 1868. His professional success was rapid and almost unprecedented. If the gossip of the Temple can be relied upon, he made three hundred guineas in the first, and one thousand guineas in the second, year af ter his call to the bar. Various explanations of his good fortune are forthcoming to sat