being then Prime Minister, and
having to select a Lord Justice of Appeal, was told that Mellish was
the fittest man for the post, he asked, "Can that be the boy who was
my fag at Eton?" He had not heard of Mellish during the intervening
forty years!

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