Just as exactly, too; for the
correctness and propriety with which these terms are introduced have
compelled the admiration of a Chief Justice and a Lord Chancellor.”
Senator Davis wrote: “We seem to have something more than a sciolist’s
temerity of indulgence in the terms of an unfamiliar art. No legal
solecisms will be found. The abstrusest elements of the common law are
impressed into a disciplined service. Over and over again, where such
knowledge is unexampled in writers unlearned in the law, Shakespeare
appears in perfect possession of it. In the law of real property, its
rules of tenure and descents, its entails, its fines and recoveries,
their vouchers and double vouchers, in the procedure of the Courts, the
method of bringing writs and arrests, the nature of actions, the rules
of pleading, the law of escapes and of contempt of court, in the
principles of evidence, both technical and philosophical, in the
distinction between the temporal and spiritual tribunals, in the law of
attainder and forfeiture, in the requisites of a valid marriage, in the
presumption of legitimacy, in the learning of the law of prerogative,
in the inalienable character of the Crown, this mastership appears with
surprising authority.”
To all this testimony (and there is much more which I have not cited)
may now be added that of a great lawyer of our own times, _viz_.: Sir
James Plaisted Wilde, Q.C. 1855, created a Baron of the Exchequer in
1860, promoted to the post of Judge-Ordinary and Judge of the Courts of
Probate and Divorce in 1863, and better known to the world as Lord
Penzance, to which dignity he was raised in 1869. Lord Penzance, as all
lawyers know, and as the late Mr. Inderwick, K.C., has testified, was
one of the first legal authorities of his day, famous for his
“remarkable grasp of legal principles,” and “endowed by nature with a
remarkable facility for marshaling facts, and for a clear expression of
his views.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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