It is possible to recall each of the cases in very few words. An Act of Parliament had been passed with a view to strengthening the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and, as this Court was one of Appeal, it stood to reason that those appointed to it to revise other Judges' decisions should have had judicial experience themselves. It was expressly provided in the Act that those to be raised to this Court should be already Judges. To the surprise of the whole country, Sir Robert Collier, well known as Mr. Gladstone's Attorney-General, and, therefore, conspicuously only a waiter for a judgeship, not a judge already, was announced as the filler of one of these vacancies, before half the readers of the newspapers knew that he had ceased to be Attorney-General. It turned out, however, that he was in reality a judge at the moment, and that he had been one for some few moments previously, having, in fact, sat on the bench of the Common Pleas for just two days. There is not space to follow Mr. Gladstone's wonderful reasoning, but it chiefly turned on a point so fine as this, that what the Act meant to stipulate was not experience, but _status_. In other words, that a man should be made a judge of one kind for five minutes, in order to be turned into one of another kind, just for the say of the thing. Amazed members of the Legislature which had passed the enactment protested that they were not so foolishly subtle as this, and that they had never, before Mr. Gladstone mentioned it, thought of any such distinction as that between _status_ and experience. But this was not the only instance in which he has told people what they had intended better than they knew, and all differently. In the Ewelme Rectory business he would have it that when a statute said Oxford it meant Cambridge, or at least that its specifying Oxford did not signify, or that it included Cambridge, or, in fact, might be construed to prescribe anything else which it did not say and which was contrary to what everybody had thought of it before. However, here, again, as the lawyers would otherwise have been troublesome, the technicality was found to have been formally complied with. The words of the enactment did really require that the man who was to be made rector of Ewelme parish should be a member of Oxford Convocation, and Mr. Harvey, Mr. Gladstone's friend, who had been educated at Cambridge, and who, until that living became vacant, had never dreamed of connection with Oxford, was made a member of the Convocation, in order to receive the living. Of course, Mr. Gladstone argued that Mr. Harvey's being a Master of Arts was enough, though the statute said nothing of that, and everybody else had thought it expressly stated a certain University where the Master of Arts was to come from.