Page:Henry Northcote (IA henrynorthcote00snairich).pdf/312

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grave a miscarriage as ever darkened the annals of English justice.

"In his private life he had known great sorrows. His only son was drowned twenty years ago while a freshman at Oxford. Had he lived, he was destined for that profession for which his father had so profound a reverence. Nothing could have been more exquisite than Joseph Brudenell's childlike devotion to his calling, yet he was always haunted by the consciousness that the ideals he had set up were beyond his grasp. This son was to have been the truer, the wiser, the stronger, the more penetrating man; yet it was never to be. The accident that deprived him of this enlarged and completer edition of himself added something to his latter years that his faithful circle of old friends found wistful and affecting. And only last week he lost the devoted daughter who had been the stay of his declining years.

"It is safe to say that no man was ever called to the bar who was more honestly beloved by all who understood the secret workings of his mind than was Joseph Brudenell. Subtle it was not, it was not agile, and it was not profound; indeed the possession of that simple and unsagacious implement conferred only one claim to preëminence. It is as a great and honest gentleman that Joseph Brudenell will be called to the Valhalla of his gods. He was past master in one art only: the art which embraces the amenities of life. Unsympathetic critics he has had in his public capacity. He has been called a pedant, a weakling, one deficient in insight; even his scholarship, which was so laboriously honorable, has not escaped inquiry; but the void left