William Heath Bennet was an English barrister and author. In 1867 he published a book of sketches of six judges he had written for a weekly law journal: Lord Ellenborough, Sir Samuel Romilly, Lord Eldon, Lord Truro, Lord Campbell and Lord Lyndhurst. An Appendix had excerpts from letters and speeches of the judges.
Each sketch has insights into the subject's interests, habits and talents. Take, for instance, the following about Sir Samuel Romilly:
"By great industry and labour, nevertheless, Sir Samuel attained such perfection in the practice of forensic eloquence as rendered him one of the most elegant, the most refined, at the same time the most nervous and forcible speaker at the Equity bar in the past, and--(with all due deference be it spoken, with a full consideration of the maxim that an old man is necessarily laudator temporis acti)--in the present age. It has been truly remarked of him, that in transacting the most ordinary forensic business, there was a peculiar grace about his manner, a gentlemanly ease, an unpresuming suavity that won the hearts of all his hearers. One faculty of an advocate he possessed above all competition: he never deviated from the point under discussion. Although called upon, as he repeatedly was, to speak upon the spur of the moment, and necessarily unprepared, he never wasted time by unnecessary or frivolous remarks, or dwelt long upon matters of minor importance; but kept the question in hand as the landmark of his address."
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