772 V. BENCH AND BAR considering which of them would be the man, not dreaming that they could all be passed over. They got me well abused in the Times and other newspapers. . . . This was the sort of thing : ' Everybody has been going about town asking his neighbour, who is Mr. Colin Blackburn.? The very ushers in the courts shake their heads and tell you they never heard of such a party.' ' His legal claims to this appoint- ment stand at a minimum.' ' The only reason which can be assigned for this strange freak of the Chancellor is that the new puisne judge is a Scotchman.' " But Lyndhurst came to his rescue in the House of Lords. " I have been asked," he said, " who is Mr. Blackburn, and a journal which takes us all to task by turns has asked somewhat indignantly, * Who is Mr. Blackburn ? ' I take leave to answer that he is a very learned person, a very sound lawyer, an admirable arguer of a law case and eminently fitted for a seat on the bench." Never was a prediction more completely realized. This un- known Scotch lawyer proved himself to be the greatest com- mon law judge of the century, and was destined in his long career of nearly thirty years in the Queen's Bench, the Ex- chequer Chamber and the House of Lords, to make a larger volume of substantial contributions to English law than any other judge in English history save only Mansfield. From the outset he easily held his own with such judges as Cock- burn, Wightman, Lush, Archibald and Field, and it was not long before he was recognized as the corner stone of the Queen's Bench. In commercial law, of which he was com- pletely master, he alone saved his court from being overshad- owed by the authority of the Common Pleas under Willes. In real property law, also, he had no superior among his associates ; and he was such a good all-round lawyer that even in those branches where a colleague was something of a spe- cialist, he easily took second place. An acute observer has thus described the Court of Queen's Bench in action during Blackburn's supremacy : " So keen and alert was his mind, so full of the rapture of the strife, that in almost all cases it was he who in the point to point race made the running or picked up the scent. On such occasions all the papers and authori- ties in a case seemed to be drawn by a sort of magnetic
