NOTES. 421 if I were to write the book afresh." A second edition was published in 1885, edited by J. C. Graham. From Michaehiias, 1852, to Trinity, 1858, in the eight volumes of Ellis & Blackburn, and the one volume of Ellis, Blackburn, & Ellis, Blackburn was one of the reporters to the Queen's Bench. In speaking of his appointment to the bench in 1859, Foss says of him, in his Biographical Dictionary, with a tempered approbation which sounds oddly now : " Though with no considerable business as a counsel, he was esteemed a sound lawyer, and after twenty years' experience at the bar he was appointed a judge of the Queen's Bench in June, 1859, and received the customary knighthood." He had never "taken silk," and it was a strange departure from prece- dent to appoint a man to be a judge who had not been Queen's Counsel ; it created a great stir. It was Lord Campbell who did this. Campbell had become Chancellor on June 18, 1859, and as early as July 3 we find in his diary the following entry : " I have already got into great disgrace by dis- posing of my judicial patronage on the principle of detur digniori. Having occasion for a new judge to succeed Erie, made Chief Justice of the Com- mon Pleas, I appointed Blackburn, the fittest man in Westminster Hall, although wearing a stuff gown ; whereas several Whig Queen's Counsel M. P.s were 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, but Lyndhurst has defended me gallantly in the House of Lords." Campbell, a Scotchman himself, and Chief Justice of the Queen's Bench from 1850 to 1859, had had Blackburn for his reporter for six of these years, and he knew his man. The wisdom of the appointment was soon abundantly shown. Blackburn's judicial opinions rank among the very best of his time. His later promotion, in 1876, to be one of the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary, was handsomely earned ; and when he retired, about eight years ago, he had not his peer upon the English bench. Strong men remain there, but one hardly knows yet where to turn for that combination of sound thinking, exact and instructive discrimination, and large, rational, and just exposition by which the law of all English-speaking countries has profited for these many years. A Record of the Commemorative Exercises of Last June. — The Harvard Law School Association has just published, in pamphlet form, an account of the exercises of June 25 last. These exercises, it will be remembered, marked the ninth annual meeting of the Association, and, more particularly, the twenty-fifth anniversary of Professor Langdell's appointment as Dean of the School. The notable gathering on that occasion was in his especial honor. The well known portrait of Professor Langdell, painted by F. P. Vinton, Esq., and reproduced in the Harvard Law Review for March, 1893, is here excellently reproduced as the frontispiece of the pamphlet. Then follow, in full, Sir Frederick Pollock's oration, delivered in Sanders Theatre, and the after-dinner addresses of the invited guests given in the Hemenway Gymnasium. The oration is too widely known to need further comment ; but it may not be amiss to direct particular attention to the addresses of President Eliot and Pro- fessor Langdell, for they contain much of interest concerning the vicis- situdes, the bold experiments, and finally the material and intellectual
