Lord St. Leonardo died yesterday week, at the great age
of ninety-four. Seventy years ago, i.e., quite at the beginning of the century, he was &heady a great power at the Bar, and this though he had been the exclusive architect of his own fortunes,
• for, as everybody knows, he was the son of a hairdresser. The deceased Chancellor was even greater as a barrister and a judge than in the capacity in which he will live longest,—namely, as a writer on law. His books contain vast knowledge, great subtlety, a true legal sagacity, but they are not by any means models of exposition, and they are even more patchworky now than when he first wrote them. His command of legal principle was never so brought out as to give any massiveness of construction or charm of organisation to his books. "Vendors and Purchasers" was certainly scrappy from the first, and is none the better for its repeated darnings. Lord St. Leonardo' knowledge was so minute and so extendive, that it will be long before new master- builders will venture to pull down even the old scaffoldings, and to recast the structures he raised on a more natural and harmoni- ous architectural principle. But certainly the lawyer as evinced by his writings was far greater than the legal author.
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