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If these pages are ever read, what follows will be as distasteful to some of my own friends as the above remarks to Mr. Gladstone's. Pardon a word about the writer himself it is needed to emphasise and justify these OBITER DICTA. I was brought up as a sportsman: I cannot remember the days when I began to shoot.
We have a solemn enjoyable way of lingering on a case. We treat law as a fine art, and relish and digest a good distinction. There is no hurry: point after point must be rightly examined and reduced to principle; judge after judge must utter forth his OBITER DICTA to delighted brethren.
It required courage to make a setting of "Ah, 'Tis a Dream!" so famous through Lassen's melody; but Hawley has said it in his own way in an air thrilled with longing and an accompaniment as full of shifting colors as one of the native sunsets. I can't forbear one obiter dictum on this poem. It has never been so translated as to reproduce its neatest bit of fancy.
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.
The usurpations of the national judiciary have come in shapes most hideous, in the obiter dicta of the Dred Scott decision, and in the use of quibbles to entangle our defenders and set loose our traitors. Take an example of another kind. In his early career Jefferson gave forth a scheme of harbor-defence by gun-boats and floating batteries.
Redmond, in following, let fall an obiter dictum on the position of the Irish controversy: "No one who observes the current of popular opinion in this country can doubt for one instant that if this opposition from the north-east corner of Ulster did not exist, Home Rule would go through to-morrow as an agreed Bill."
And in the course of sentencing, my lord had this obiter dictum: "I have been the means, under God, of haanging a great number, but never just such a disjaskit rascal as yourself." The words were strong in themselves; the light and heat and detonation of their delivery, and the savage pleasure of the speaker in his task, made them tingle in the ears.
We have a solemn enjoyable way of lingering on a case. We treat law as a fine art, and relish and digest a good distinction. There is no hurry: point after point must be rightly examined and reduced to principle; judge after judge must utter forth his obiter dicta to delighted brethren.
Before that time his delightful Obiter Dicta had secured for him a wide circle of friends who had never seen his face, and by these admirers his first appearance on the social scene was awaited with lively interest. What would he be like? Should we be disillusioned? Would he talk as pleasantly as he wrote?
We hope to hear from the author again, and in a form which shall enable his knowledge and experience in matters of Art to have freer play than the exigencies of a novel allow them, and in which his abilities in the discussion of aesthetics shall have more scope given them than that of the obiter dicta in a story. Hymns of the Ages.
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