However, I return to the Master of the Rolls. In dealing with facts, Jessel has never had a superior, and in our days, perhaps, no rival. He knew all the ways of the financial and commercial world. In his treatment of points of law, every one admitted and admired both an extraordinary knowledge and mastery of reported cases, and an extremely acute and exact appreciation of principles, a complete power of extracting them from past cases and fitting them to the case in hand. He had a memory which forgot nothing, and which, indeed, wearied him by refusing to forget trivial things. When he delivered an elaborate judgment it was his delight to run through a long series of cases, classifying and distinguishing them. His strength made him bold; he went further than most judges in readiness to carry a principle somewhat beyond any decided case, and to overrule an authority which he did not respect. The fault charged on him was his tendency, perhaps characteristic of the Hebrew mind, to take a somewhat hard and dry view of a legal principle, overlooking its more delicate shades, and, in the interpretation of statutes or documents, to adhere too strictly to the letter, overlooking the spirit. An eminent lawyer said, "If all judges had been like Jessel, there might have been no equity." In that respect many deemed him inferior to Lord Cairns, the greatest judge among his contemporaries, who united to an almost equally wide and accurate knowledge of the law a grasp of principles even more broad and philosophical than Jessel's was. Be this as it may, the judgments of the Master of the Rolls, which fill so many pages of the recent English Law Reports, are among the best that have ever gone to build up the fabric of the English law. Except on two occasions, when he reserved judgment at the request of his colleagues in the Court of Appeal, they were delivered on the spur of the moment, after the conclusion of the arguments, or of so much of the arguments as he allowed counsel to deliver; but they have all the merits of carefully-considered utterances, so clear and direct is their style, so concisely as well as cogently are the authorities discussed and the grounds of decision stated. The bold and sweeping character which often belongs to them makes them more instructive as well as more agreeable reading than the judgments of most modern judges, whose commonest fault is a timidity which tries to escape, by dwelling on the details of the particular case, from the enunciation of a definite general principle. Positive and definite Jessel always was. As he put it himself: "I may be wrong, but I never have any doubts."