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Updated: June 27, 2025
His obiter dicta have often the penetration, and always more than the equity, of Voltaire's, for Dryden never loses temper, and never altogether qualifies his judgment by his self-love. "He was a more universal writer than Voltaire," said Horne Tooke, and perhaps it is true that he had a broader view, though his learning was neither so extensive nor so accurate.
Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets. Dowden's Studies in Literature, and Dowden's Transcripts and Studies. Minto's Characteristics of English Poets. Matthew Arnold's Essays in Criticism. Leslie Stephen's Hours in a Library. Birrell's Obiter Dicta. Hales's Folia Litteraria. Pater's Appreciations. Pocket Classics, Golden Treasury Series, etc. Biography Dictionary of National Biography, 63 vols.
Stead honestly believed that he was entitled to use my frank obiter dicta for the purpose of correcting what he regarded as my public errors.
But the philosophy, the theory of government, the understanding of the framers of the constitution, must be considered, if the expression will be allowed, as obiter dicta, and be judged on their merits. What binds is the thing done, not the theory on which it was done, or on which the actors explained their work either to themselves or to others.
In this opinion he also gives evidence, in their highest form, of his other notable qualities as a judicial stylist: his "tiger instinct for the jugular vein"; his rigorous pursuit of logical consequences; his power of stating a case, wherein he is rivaled only by Mansfield; his scorn of the qualifying "buys," "if's," and "though's"; the pith and balance of his phrasing, a reminiscence of his early days with Pope; the developing momentum of his argument; above all, his audacious use of the obiter dictum.
The judge who sat on Muir and Palmer, the famous Braxfield, let fall from the bench the obiter dictum 'I never liked the French all my days, but now I hate them. If Thomas Smith, the Edinburgh Spearman, were in court, he must have been tempted to applaud. The people of that land were his abhorrence; he loathed Buonaparte like Antichrist.
" And when he saw a young friend at a club supping on pâté de foie gras and champagne, he said encouragingly, "That's quite right. All the pleasant things in life are unwholesome, or expensive, or wrong." And amid these rather grim morsels of experimental philosophy he would interject certain obiter dicta which came straight from the unspoiled goodness of a really kind heart.
I think not; nor would it be so if people began Greek at a later and more critical stage of their education. It is also true that the book is full of that exceedingly arbitrary and unproved assertion, of that rather fanciful terminology, of those sometimes questionable æsthetic obiter dicta, of which, from first to last, Mr Arnold was so prolific.
Why, even some of my own innocent notions of the past of pre-Macquarie Street days seemed nearer the real thing than one or two of poor Mr. Smith's obiter dicta. I had noted the hats of that elect assemblage, and there had not been a billycock among them. Not a single example of the headgear which Mr. Smith held necessary for the self-respecting man in Sydney!
It is said that this interesting personage once instructed his jury to find that "the diseased came to his death from an ulster on the stomach." These anecdotes are, perhaps, what judges would call obiter dicta, yet the coroner's court has more than once been utilized as a field in the actual preparation of a criminal case.
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