e highest reputation, so that most of the heavy and difficult cases
were brought into his court. He possessed a wonderfully quick, as well
as powerful, mind, which got to the kernel of a matter while other
people were still hammering at the shell, and which applied legal
principles just as swiftly and surely as it mastered a group of
complicated facts.

The Rolls Court used to present, while he presided over it, a curious
and interesting sight, which led young counsel, who had no business to
do there, to frequent it for the mere sake of watching the Judge. When
the leading counsel for the plaintiff was opening his case, Jessel
listened quietly for the first few minutes only, and then began to
address questions to the counsel, at first so as to guide his remarks
in a particular direction, then so as to stop his course altogether
and turn his speech into a series of answers to the Judge's
interrogatories. When, by a short dialogue of this kind, Jessel had
possessed himself of the vital facts, he would turn to the leading
counsel for the defendant and ask him whether he admitted such and
such facts alleged by the plaintiff to be true. If these facts were
admitted, the Judge proceeded to indicate the view he was disposed to
take of the law applicable to the facts, and, by a few more questions
to the counsel on the one side or the other, as the case might be,
elicited their respective legal grounds of contention. If the facts
were not admitted, it of course became necessary to call the witnesses
or read the affidavits, processes which the vigorous impatience of the
Judge considerably shortened, for it was a dangerous thing to read to
him any irrelevant or loosely-drawn paragraph. But more generally his
searching questions and the sort of pressure he applied so cut down
the issues of fact that there was little or nothing left in
controversy regarding which it was necessary to examine the evidence
in detail, since the counsel felt that there was no use in putting
before him a contention which they could not sustain under the fire
of his criticism. Then Jessel proceeded to deliver his opinion and
dispose of the case. The affair was from beginning to end far less an
argument and counter-argument by counsel than an investigation
directly conducted by the Judge himself, in which the principal
function of the counsel was to answer the Judge's questions concisely
and exactly, so that the latter might as soon as possible get to the