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Hereditary Genius
131
understanding that when a barrister was elevated to the Bench, he
should either marry his mistress, or put her away.
According to this extraordinary statement, it would appear that
much more than one half of the judges that sat on the Bench in the
beginning of this century, had no legitimate offspring before the
advanced period of their lives at which they were appointed judges.
One half of them could not, because it was at that stage in their
career that they married their mistresses; and there were others who,
having then put away their mistresses, were, for the first time, able to
marry. Nevertheless, I have shown that the number of the legitimate
children of the Judges is considerable, and that even under that
limitation, they are, on the whole, by no means an unfertile race.
Bearing in mind what I have just stated, it must follow that they are
extremely prolific. Nay, there are occasional instances of enormous
families, in all periods of their history. But do not the families die out?
I will examine into the descendants of those judges whose names are
to be found in the appendix to the chapter upon them, who gained
peerages, and who last sat on the Bench previous to the close of the
reign of George IV. There are thirty-one of them; nineteen of the
peerages remain and twelve are extinct. Under what conditions did
these twelve become extinct? Were any of those conditions peculiar
to the twelve, and not shared by the remaining nineteen?
In order to obtain an answer to these inquiries, I examined into the
number of children and grandchildren of all the thirty-one peers, and
into the particulars of their alliances, and tabulated them; when, to my
astonishment, I found a very simple, adequate, and novel explanation,
of the common cause of extinction of peerages, stare me in the face.
It appeared, in the first instance, that a considerable proportion of the
new peers and of their sons
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