Confessions of a Lord Chief Justice. all his friends. Unlike many less distin guished leaders of the Bar, he takes a kindly interest in the prosperity of his devils and does not forget their services. He is an in timate friend, and at one time worshipped in the congregation, of the Rev. Llewellyn Davies, head of the Broad Church party in
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England, but his religious sympathies are now generally understood to be Unitarian.
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Since the foregoing was written Sir Hor ace Davey has been appointed to succeed Lord Bowen in the Court of Appeal. Lex.
THE CONFESSIONS OF A LORD CHIEF JUSTICE. JOHN SCOTT was Attorney-General for Ireland, and from 1784 till his death, in 1798, Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench in Ireland. He was created successively Baron Earlscourt, Viscount Earlscourt, and Earl of Clonmell, and died possessed of property of the value of £200,000. Shortly before his death he gave peremptory orders that all his papers should be destroyed, and superintended himself the consignment of the documents to the flames. Through some strange fatality his diary escaped the general destruction, and is still extant. It was printed for private circula tion among the members of Lord ClonmeH's family, and short extracts from its pages have been given to the public in a work by Mr. V. J. Eitzpatrick, entitled " Ireland be fore the Union," published in Dublin more than a quarter of a century ago, and now long out of print. In his diary Lord Clonmell reveals his true inwardness with the startling candor of a Marie Baskirtcheff. Here are a few ex tracts which lawyers of a later generation will read with keen interest: — "Good Resolutions. Thursday, June 2, 1774. I am, I believe, thirty-five years old this month, just nine years at the Bar, near five years in Parliament, about four years King's Counsel. To- morrow, being Friday, Trinity Term sits. I therefore resolve to enter upon my profession as upon a five years' campaign, at war with every difficulty, and determined to conquer them. If I continue a bachelor until I am forty years
old, and can realize two thousand pounds per annum, I will give up business as a lawyer, and confine 1t merely to the duties of any office I may fill. I will exert my interest to the utmost in law and constitutional learning for these five years, so far as temperance, diligence, persever ance, and watchfulness can operate, and then hey for a holiday." "Horrors of being Unprepared in Court. — The pains of the damned are not equal to the horrors of going to court unprepared, and the fact of losing your reputation and going down in it. Whilst, therefore, you have an atom of business undone, give up every object, pursuit, pleasure, avocation, diversion; banish everything from your mind but business — the business of your profession. Quarter of an hour to breakfast, one hour only to dinner when alone, two to exercise, four to bed, quarter to rest in a chair after fatigue — wine. "Prudence. — Have an eternal guard upon what goes 1nto your mouth and what comes out of it, and always wait a little before you answer, and answer all unpleasant questions by asking another question, and never before you can begin with a smile. "Cunning. — Lord Bacon says a proper mix ture of the lion and the fox is essential to a man of the world. I think the proper mixture is a fox's head, with a lion's heart to carry the scheme into execution. "Mechanical Habits. — As often as you put your fingers across and join your thumbs at the points, which you must do a thousand times a day, call the right thumb courage, and the four fingers of the right hand sagacity, and spirit, activity and address; the left thumb prudence,
