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Hereditary Genius
57
were sons of clergymen of scanty means. Others have begun life in alien
professions, yet, notwithstanding their false start, have easily recovered lost
ground in after life. Lord Erskine was first in the navy and then in the army,
before he became a barrister. Lord Chelmsford was originally a
midshipman. Now a large number of men with antecedents as unfavourable
to success as these, and yet successful men, are always to be found at the
Bar, and therefore I say the barristers are themselves a selected body; and
the fact of every judge having been taken from the foremost rank of 3, 000
of them, is proof that his exceptional ability is of an enormously higher order
than if the 3, 000 barristers had been conscripts, drawn by lot from the
general mass of their countrymen. I therefore need not trouble myself with
quoting passages from biographies, to prove that each of the Judges whose
name I have occasion to mention, is a highly gifted man. It is precisely in
order to avoid the necessity of this tedious work, that I have selected the
Judges for my first chapter.
In speaking of the English Judges, I have adopted the well-known “Lives
of the Judges,” by Foss, as my guide. It was published in 1865, so I have
adopted that date as the limit of my inquiries. I have considered those only
as falling under the definition of “judges” whom he includes as such. They
are the Judges of the Courts of Chancery and Common Law, and the
Master of the Rolls, but not the Judges of the Admiralty nor of the Court of
Canterbury. By the latter limitation, I lose the advantage of counting Lord
Stowell (brother of the Lord Chancellor Eldon), the remarkable family of
the Lushingtons, that of Sir R. Phillimore, and some others. Through the
limitation as regards time, I lose, by ending with the year 1863, the recently-
created judges, such as Judge Selwyn, brother of the Bishop of Lichfield,
and also of the Professor of Divinity at Cambridge. But I believe, from
cursory
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