Some Old Scots Judges: Anecdotes and Impressions (Classic Reprint) - Tapa blanda

Excerpt from Some Old Scots Judges: Anecdotes and Impressions

As will be apparent to every student of the period covered by these sketches, I have not gone to any recondite sources for my materials. My debt to such works as Cockburn's Memorials of his Time, Ramsay's Scotland and Scotsmen, Kay's Edinburgh Portraits, and the writings of the late Rev. Henry Grey Graham (one of the most brilliant representatives of the school of literary historians) is quite obvious. But while relying largely on these works, and others acknowledged in the footnotes, I have endeavoured to give my own impressions of the judges who form the subject matter of this book. In sketching their personal characteristics, I have sought not only to bring them into relation with the social, literary, and political life of their own time, but to make clear the ethical gulf which separates their day from ours.

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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Excerpt from Some Old Scots Judges: Anecdotes and Impressions

While this volume treats of a group of Scots judges who flourished in the latter half of the eighteenth century, and the earlier decades of the nineteenth, it is primarily addressed, not to the man of law, but to the general reader. These pages are in nowise an attempt to explicate or estimate judicial character from a legal standpoint. Naturally in a series of biographical portraits such as are here presented, the position of Kames, Monboddo, and the rest as lawyers, cannot altogether be ignored; but what little has been said merely recapitulates in the most general terms the opinion of competent authorities.

My main object lies in quite another direction, i.e. to present an adequate picture, by means of anecdotes and contemporary testimony, of the personalities of certain old Scots judges who are remembered more by their debt to adventitious circumstance than by their judicial eminence. The twelve senators here portrayed widely differed in intellectual and moral worth, but they had two things in common - they were all Scotsmen, and they were all men of marked individuality.

About the Publisher

Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com

This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.