on the growth of Joint Stock Companies in the present century, while the new London Government Act has also been treated.

Hazell's Annual for 1900. Edited by W. PALMER, B.A. (15th year). London: Hazell, Watson, & Viney, Ltd. 1900.-This valuable annual contains as usual an astonishing amount of information, and its accuracy is very surprising when the mass of matter with which it deals is considered. The present issue pays special attention to Foreign Affairs and, with its maps and summaries of negotiations and treaties, gives an ordinary reader full information of the most important of our foreign relations. The summary of the negotiations with the Transvaal is particularly full and opportune. It quite keeps up its previously high standard in all respects.

Whitaker's P.erage, 1900. Pp. 542. Whitaker & Sons.-This work, which is Whitaker's Titled Persons under a new title, is a very complete and accurate directory of the class of “titled persons." The work, as now presented, has been thoroughly revised, and the Politics of all members of the House of Lords are stated in the Directory. Every effort seems to have been made to verify the accuracy of all references, and the work is in every way a worthy companion to the Almanack.

Herbert Fry's Royal Guide to the London Charities. Edited by JOHN Lane. (36th annual edition.) London: Chatto & Windus.-This is a most useful and comprehensive annual, which should be within reach of all philanthropists and good Samaritans. The charities are arranged in alphabetical order, showing name, date of foundation, address, objects, annual income, chief officials, etc., and in addition the Editor's preface is both instructive and interesting.

The Lawyer's Companion and Diary, 1900. Edited by E. LAYMAN, B.A. London: Stevens & Sons.-This publication, so well known to the legal profession, contains, in addition to a diary for every day of the year, various tables of costs, stamp duties, time-tables of the Courts, and much other information which the practising lawyer needs always at hand for ready reference. It is a complete London and Provincial Law Directory.

Received too late for notice in this issue :-BROWN's Bainbridge's Law of Mines and Minerals; LIGHTWOOD'S Fawcett's Landlord and Tenant; LECKY'S Map of Life; HARVEY'S West Australian Law Reporter; DIXON'S Law and Practice of Divorce; EASTON's Appointment of New Trustees; GRAHAM'S English Political Philosophy; WARBURTON'S Justices' Note-Book; INNES' Law of Easements; CAMPBELL'S Ruling Cases; HEYWOOD's Lunacy Practice.

Other publications received :-Alphonse Rivier; Journal of Comparative Legislation (John Murray); The Brief; Irish Weekly Law Reports and Journal.

The Law Magazine and Review receives or exchanges with the following, amongst other publications:-Review of Reviews, Juridical Review, Public Opinion, Law Times, Law Journal, Justice of the Peace, Law Quarterly Review, Irish Law Times, Scots Law Times, Australian Law Times, Speaker, Accountants' Journal, North American Review, Canada Law Journal, Chicago Legal News, American Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Case and Comment, Green Bag, Virginia Law Register, American Lawyer, Albany Law Journal, Madras Law Journal, Calcutta Weekly Notes, Law Notes, Queensland Law Journal, Law Students' Journal, Westminster Review, Concord, Bombay Law Reporter, MedicoLegal Journal, Kathiawar (Indian) Law Reports.

THE

LAW MAGAZINE AND REVIEW.

No. CCCXVI.-MAY, 1900.

I. IN MEMORIAM: THE RIGHT HONOURABLE LORD JUSTICE CHITTY.

A

SUFFICIENT time has elapsed since the death of Lord Justice Chitty to enable one who knew him well to express an opinion as to his work as a judge, without danger of allowing a feeling of personal affection and admiration to warp judgment.

The Public can tell whether a judge is expeditious or slow, whether he is courteous and patient or hasty and rude, whether he plays to the gallery or not, but it cannot know whether he is learned and well-read.

Suitors are capable of appreciating the care, attention, and patience given by a judge to their individual cases, but they are not capable of appreciating the amount of learning and the accumulated result of legal experience brought to bear in the everyday matters which come before a Judge of the Chancery Division.

Solicitors are fair and capable critics of a judge in his relation towards themselves and their clients, and, apart from an appreciation of the highest exercise of judicial faculties, they are as qualified as any to give a true verdict upon his work. Members of the Bar can speak of a judge, and form and

express their judgment from the point of view of advocates and read lawyers.

Those who daily practised before the late judge, can speak, besides, of patience, forbearance, allowance for demands of clients to have their cases stated, and of the importance of the Court as a school of law. From the last-named a deep debt of gratitude is due to the late judge. To them day by day the store of knowledge, wisdom, and experience of an acute, a learned, worldly-wise, and accomplished lawyer and scholar, was given without reservation. Tolerant of reference to apposite quotation from modern writers, loving and ready to cap classic allusion, he was absolutely opposed to flourish. "That is rhetoric, is it not, Mr. X. ?" he would say goodnaturedly, when an advocate was tempted to stray beyond the strict line of logical reference, and Mr. X. would retire from the position; "per Mr. Z.," then he would say, summing up an argument addressed by counsel, giving the result in a fair but most destructive deduction.

There will be no dissentient voice, I am sure, from the ranks of the public, suitors, solicitors, or the Bar, if the opinion of the writer be expressed that no man ever went from the court of justice with a sense of wrong done him when Chitty presided. No suitor ever left his court without feeling that his case had been fully and fairly tried, no solicitor ever felt that his client had suffered injury on account of the impatience of the tribunal, or the inexperience of the advocate.

But the Bar will bear another testimony to the great qualities of the late judge. They will say that he was a great lawyer, and great not only in his knowledge of equitable principles, but in his intimate acquaintance with the law relating to real property, and with the common law even in some of its obscurer and now nearly forgotten branches.

A friend of the writer, well qualified to speak on the matter, says of him: "He knew law; many of us have, as it

were, a banker's balance of knowledge in our libraries, if we are given time to go and draw upon it; but Chitty's knowledge was ready money. It is hardly a figure of speech to say that he had his law at his fingers' ends, so ready, so accurate, so unfailing was his answer to any call upon his knowledge. He did not merely know where to find the law on such or such a point-he could and did tell you at once what that law was."

Coupled with an intense hatred of anything that savoured of fraud, oppression, or dishonourable conduct, Chitty never moulded the law into strange shapes to meet his private sense of what was honourable or right from a moral point of view.

Within the law the rogue never failed to meet his deserts, but he had what the law allowed him. An occasional expression of indignation against mean and dishonourable conduct, an occasional expression of impatience with a counsel who the judge thought was pressing an untenable point too far, did not prevent the exhibition as a judge of one of the sweetest and fairest judicial tempers man was ever blessed with.

One point, not perhaps sufficiently appreciated by those who did not practise before him up to the end of his career, is that as a judge he ripened and improved year by year, and to the last day he sat, showed how a great mind is capable of improvement.

Was he then without faults? Who is? In the early part of his career as a judge it may be said he sometimes appeared to lack sufficient confidence in his own knowledge.

Quick to perceive, he was somewhat slow to determine; though this diffidence disappeared with experience, he was to the last reluctant to decide without having each point raised thrashed out. It may be that his love of the law led him occasionally to invite a discussion of points not too closely related to the case before him, and although it could

never be said of him, in the words of Lord Bacon, that “a loquacious judge is no well-tuned cymbal," the Lord Justice, like his predecessor, Sir George Jessell, spoke frequently in the course of the argument.

If it be the primary duty of a judge to do justice according to law, as between suitors in the immediate case before him; if it be a duty hardly second to it to satisfy parties that they have been fairly heard, these duties were never better fulfilled. If it be a grace to a judge to be patient and courteous, that grace was his; if it be an ornament that he should express the law in clear and lucid terms, that ornament was his.

The fame of a judge rests with posterity, a true estimation of his work with his contemporaries. Chitty forwarded the work commenced by Sir George Jessell, in moulding the new practice and procedure inaugurated by the Judicature Acts, and in making that a success which in weaker hands might well have failed; and, undoubtedly, his decisions under the Settled Land Acts-the greatest real property revolution effected in this country for centuries-have much to do with its success.

Nothing has been said here of the private character and career of the late judge-these are well known. At school, at college, at the Bar, and on the Bench, if not a spoiled child of nature and fortune, he was at least one endowed with natural and acquired qualifications which might well have excited the utmost envy of his fellows had they not been so gracefully borne.

Amongst those who stood by his graveside or attended the memorial service at Lincoln's Inn, there was an universal sense that not only a great lawyer, but a great man had gone to rest.

E. W. B.