nths only, so his time was too short to permit him
to enrich our jurisprudence and leave a memory of himself in the
Reports. Palmer sat in the House of Lords from his accession to the
Chancellorship in 1872 till his death in 1896, and, while fully
sustaining his reputation as a man of eminent legal capacity, was, on
the whole, less brilliant as a judge than he had been as an advocate,
because a tendency to over-refinement is more dangerous in the
judicial than in the forensic mind. He made an admirable Chancellor,
and showed himself more industrious and more zealous for law reform
than did Cairns. But Cairns was the greater judge, and became to the
generation which argued before him a model of judicial excellence. In
hearing a cause he was singularly patient, rarely interrupting
counsel, and then only to put some pertinent question. His figure was
so still, his countenance so impassive, that people sometimes doubted
whether he was really attending to all that was urged at the bar. But
when the time came for him to deliver judgment, which in the House of
Lords is done in the form of a speech addressed to the House in
moving or supporting a motion that is to become the judgment of the
tribunal, it was seen how fully he had apprehended the case in all its
bearings. His deliverances were never lengthy, but they were
exhaustive. They went straight to the vital principles on which the
question turned, stated these in the most luminous way, and applied
them with unerring exactitude to the particular facts. It is as a
storehouse of fundamental doctrines that his judgments are so
valuable. They disclose less knowledge of case-law than do those of
some other judges; but Cairns was not one of the men who love cases
for their own sake, and he never cared to draw upon, still less to
display, more learning than was needed for the matter in hand. It was
in the grasp of the principles involved, in the breadth of view which
enabled him to see these principles in their relation to one another,
in the precision of the logic which drew conclusions from the
principles, in the perfectly lucid language in which the principles
were expounded and applied, that his strength lay. Herein he surpassed
the most eminent of contemporary judges, the then Master of the Rolls,
for while Jessel had perhaps a quicker mind than Cairns, he had not so
wide a mind, nor one so thoroughly philosophical in the methods by
which it moved.

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