describing duties of insurers, captains, pilots, and miscellaneous
sea-officers that are or might be,--like a schoolmaster puzzled by a
hard sum, who reads the context with emphasis. But all this flood not
serving the cuttle-fish to get away in, the horrible shark of the
district-attorney being still there, grimly awaiting with his "The
court must define,"--the poor court pleaded its inferiority. The
superior court must establish the law for this, and it read away
piteously the decisions of the Supreme Court, but read to those who
had no pity. The judge was forced at last to rule something, and the
lawyers saved their rogue under the fog of a definition. The parts
were so well cast and discriminated, that it was an interesting game
to watch. The government was well enough represented. It was stupid,
but it had a strong will and possession, and stood on that to the
last. The judge had a task beyond his preparation, yet his position
remained real; he was there to represent a great reality, the justice
of states, which we could well enough see beetling over his head, and
which his trifling talk nowise affected, and did not impede, since he
was entirely well-meaning.

The statement of the fact, however, sinks before the statement of the
law, which requires immeasurably higher powers, and is a rarest gift,
being in all great masters one and the same thing,--in lawyers,
nothing technical, but always some piece of common sense, alike
interesting to laymen as to clerks. Lord Mansfield's merit is the
merit of common sense. It is the same quality we admire in Aristotle,
Montaigne, Cervantes, or in Samuel Johnson, or Franklin. Its
application to law seems quite accidental. Each of Mansfield's famous
decisions contains a level sentence or two, which hit the mark. His
sentences are not always finished to the eye, but are finished to the
mind. The sentences are involved, but a solid proposition is set