19. ZANE: THE FIVE AGES 711 member of the bar, are continually appearing. A mediocre individual, uttering dull wooden platitudes from the bench, has gained the reputation of a great judge, because his mind was on a level with that of a majority of the bar, although to the ablest lawyers his stupidity has been a con- stant irritation. The celebrated advocate, on the other hand, in certain instances, when he has reached the bench, has known too much law for the ordinary practitioner ; he has been too quick, has leaped to conclusions, has taken one side or the other, and, unconscious of partiality, has been practically unfit to properly weigh conflicting evidence or authorities. The laborious lawyer, who has attained the bench, has often begun a hunt for foolish and irrelevant matters, and has impeded business by a morbid inability to formulate his own conclusions. The haughty, impatient, arbitrary, and overbearing judge, insolent to the bar and savage toward the witnesses, has not been wanting. The judge who has proclaimed his desire for less law and more justice, who has brayed about the people's and the poor man's rights, and has violated settled principles and become a judicial demagogue, has needed the rebuke and correction of .higher tribunals. Through all judicial history, it is ap- parent that the true judicial mind, which hears the whole case before it decides, which is capable of suspending judg- ment until in possession of every consideration of value, which is absolutely unaff^ected by mere temporary or irrel- evant matters, which looks at every case both from the standpoint of the general, fixed, and settled rules of law, but at the same time with an acute sense for right and a real desire to advance justice, is the rarest type of the human intellect. But one fact about lawyers is a noticeable one. For centuries the common-law lawyers had been a race of men who took little interest in any science outside the common law itself. Noticing this narrowness of mind joined to acute understanding and wide learning in their own field, the great scholar Erasmus had remarked of the lawyers of Henry VII. and Henry VIII., that they were " doctissimum genus indoc- tissimorum hominum." So far as we can ascertain, few of
