lawyers, but he was a great deal more learned than many
people believed him to be, and as an ecclesiastical lawyer had perhaps
few or no superiors. His fault--a natural fault in one who had been so
successful as an advocate--was that of being too apt to take one side.
He allowed, also, certain political or personal prepossessions to colour
the tone of his remarks from the bench. A game-preserving landlord had
not to thank the gods when his case, however buttressed by generally
accepted claims, came before Coleridge. Towards the end of his life his
health failed, and he became somewhat indolent. On the whole, he was not
so strong a man in his judicial capacity as Campbell or Cockburn; but it
must be admitted that his scholarship, his refinement, his power of
oratory, and his character raised the tone of the bench while he sat
upon it, and that if it has been adorned by greater judicial abilities,
it has hardly ever known a greater combination of varied merits. It is
curious to observe that of all judges the man whom he put highest was
one very unlike himself, the great master of the rolls, Sir William
Grant. Coleridge died in harness on the 14th of June 1894.

Coleridge's work, first as a barrister, and then as a judge, prevented
his publishing as much as he otherwise would have done, but his
addresses and papers would, if collected, fill a substantial volume and
do much honour to his memory. One of the best, and one most eminently
characteristic of the man, was his inaugural address to the
Philosophical Institution at Edinburgh in 1870; another was a paper on
Wordsworth (1873). He was an exceptionally good letter-writer. Of travel
he had very little experience. He had hardly been to Paris; once, quite
near the end of his career, he spent a few days in Holland, and came
back a willing slave to the genius of Rembrandt; but his longest absence
from England was a visit, which had something of a representative legal
character, to the United States. It is strange that a man so steeped in
Greek and Roman poetry, so deeply interested in the past, present and
future of Christianity, never saw Rome, or Athens, or the Holy Land. A
subsidiary cause, no doubt, was the fatal custom of neglecting modern
languages at English schools. He felt himself at a disadvantage when he
passed beyond English-speaking lands, and cordially disliked the
situation. No notice of Coleridge should omit to make mention of his
extraordinary store of anecdo