title De Villiers of Wynberg; and returned home to become first chief justice of the Union (1910). In 1912, and again in July 1914, he was acting governor-general. He died after a very short illness at Pretoria 2 September 1914. He was succeeded as second baron by his elder son, Charles Percy (born 1871).
In person De Villiers was moderately tall, lean, and active, a man of immense dignity which was relieved by a kindly spirit and a certain dry humour. He was a good shot, a keen fisherman, a lover of animals, especially dogs, and of bees, and an ardent farmer and grower of vines. In politics he cherished the best traditions of Cape native policy, upheld the British connexion and South African liberties, and, throughout his life, saw South Africa whole. His chief claim to remembrance is as a judge, and a great one. Other South Africans have been more learned in the letter of the law, but none have understood its spirit so well. Some say that at times he dispensed ‘De Villiers’ law’, and his judgments have been reversed on one or two points since his death; but in spite of the rapidity with which he gave his decisions, the Privy Council questioned his judgments only four times. For the space of forty-one years he did substantial justice, delivering a series of weighty judgments on a far greater variety of subjects than usually falls to the lot of any British judge. He outlived the judges of his own generation, and, when a new generation arose, he was already an institution.
He had become chief justice at a critical time. In 1873 the gold and the diamonds were drawing a flood of new men to the interior, and the various states and colonies into closer contact. Besides the supreme court at Cape Town, there were by 1882 five similar courts in South Africa under four separate legislatures, unchecked by a common. court of appeal. Their law and practice were fundamentally the same, but divergences were bound to occur. These divergences were checked by the fact that the Cape supplied many of the judges to the other courts, and by the growing prestige of De Villiers. Even so the law of the colony was in a state of confusion. The criminal law had become practically English. But the Roman-Dutch civil law was being anglicized in a haphazard manner. De Villiers’ great achievement was to incorporate in the main body of the Roman-Dutch code as much of the English civil law as was necessary to meet rapidly changing circumstances. And the new system, which owes more to him than to any other single man, has spread from the borders of the South Africa of 1878 northward to the Zambesi.
[Unpublished papers and correspondence; notices in the Cape (South African) Law Journal, passim; B. Williams, Cecil Rhodes, 1921; J. H. Hofmeyr, Life of J. H. Hofmeyr, 1913; E. A. Walker, Lord De Villiers and His Times: South Africa, 1842-1914, 1924; private information.]
DOBELL, BERTRAM (1842-1914), bookseller and man of letters, was born at Battle 9 January 1842, the eldest son of Edward Dobell, a journeyman tailor, by his wife, Elizabeth Eldridge. His father migrated to London, where he was stricken with paralysis. Bertram began earning his living as errand-boy to a grocer, and afterwards served in the business. Even then he collected old books out of penny boxes on bookstalls. He married Eleanor Wymer in 1869, and with a capital of ten pounds opened a stationer’s and newsagent’s shop at Queen’s Crescent, Haverstock Hill. Here in 1876 he printed his first catalogue of second-hand books. His final move to Charing Cross Road was made in 1887.
In 1874 Dobell first met James Thomson [q.v.], whose City of Dreadful Night was appearing piecemeal in Charles Bradlaugh’s National Reformer. Dobell arranged for its independent publication in 1880, and steadily befriended the poet till his death in 1882. He edited Thomson’s Voice from the Nile and Shelley (1884), Poetical Works, with memoir (1895), Biographical and Critical Studies (1896), a selection from the poems (1899), and Leopardi’s Essays (1905). He planned facsimile reprints of Shelley, and issued Alastor (1885); the Shelley Society reissued it, and printed his edition of The Wandering Jew (1887). He published Shelley’s Letters to Elizabeth Hitchener (1908). Other pioneer work was his publication of Goldsmith’s A Prospect of Society (the earliest form of The Traveller) in 1902, and Sidelights on Charles Lamb (1908), tracing Lamb’s work in the London Magazine.
Dobell’s great achievement was the recovery of the poetical works of Thomas Traherne (1903), followed by the prose Centuries of Meditations (1908). The manuscripts, originally sold for a few pence, were bought by Alexander Balloch Grosart [q.v.], who intended to publish them as the work of Henry Vaughan; Dobell acquired them, and followed up a clue by which he identified the author. His recovery of Traherne gives him a secure place in literary history. He also col-
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