Modern Cambridge has been prolific in men of letters: Byron,
Macaulay, Thackeray, Kinglake, Tennyson, Fitzgerald, Grote, Kingsley,
Seely, F. D. Maurice, Samuel Butler, Leslie Stephen, and Maitland are
names taken at random. The list of her public men is a long one and
includes the great Whig peers from Palmerston, Melbourne, Grey, and
Lansdowne to such men as the late Duke of Devonshire and the late
Earl Spencer: the senior branch of the House of Cecil has been
uniformly faithful to Cambridge since the days of the great Lord
Burleigh. The Manners family have been as stoutly Cambridge; and the
late Duke of Rutland, better known as Lord John Manners, was a
familiar figure in the University. It is a Cambridge College that
can claim at this moment the Speaker, the Lord Chief Justice, the
Leader of the House of Lords, the Leader of the Opposition in the
Commons, the Viceroy of India, the Ex-Viceroy, and the retiring
Governor-General of Canada.
Cambridge as a home of legal studies has been famous since the
sixteenth century: Lyndhurst, Cranworth, Pollock, Fitzjames Stephen
are legal luminaries of modern times. Trinity Hall is the College
with which the study of law is particularly associated. For two
hundred years this College practically controlled the Court of
Arches, which until the nineteenth century was some way advanced took
cognizance of all Probate and Admiralty cases, as well as of causes
arising out of ecclesiastical jurisdictions. For some time the
Masters and Fellows appointed the Dean of Arches, and the Master
enjoyed a right to rooms in Doctors' Commons. Among learned
Civilians who have presided over the destinies of "the Hall" are Sir
James Exton, Sir Nathaniel Lloyd, Sir Edward Simpson, and Sir William
Wynne. The last of this order (for the Court of Arches lost its
civil jurisdiction at this time) was Sir Herbert Jenner Fust, whose
name will long be remembered in connection with the celebrated Gorham
judgment. Sir Herbert was succeeded in the Mastership by the late
Sir Henry Summer Maine, of Pembroke College, sometime Corpus
Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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