From the Irish Times of 17 November 1877, this complaint about Jonathan Christian (image above), Lord Justice of Appeal in the Irish Court of Chancery (1867-78) and later briefly Lord Justice of the Court of Appeal in Ireland (1878):

“Lord Justice Christian has adopted the habit of writing his judgments, and in delivery, of course, reads them. Many men of much lower capacity than the Justice of Appeal can, by long and laboured plodding in the seclusion of a study, produce very imposing compositions so abstruse in thought and expression as to be half unintelligible. Had the same men been compelled to speak off extemporaneously their views on the same subject, they would be compelled to talk intelligibly, because there would be no time for the painstaking manufacture of strange phrases. They would, moreover, be compelled to speak at a reasonable speed, for the act of thought occupies a perceptible amount of time as well as the act of speech. But any blockhead may mumble and mouth a written speech in a manner and at a rate which not even the ear, much less the hand, can always follow.”

Lord Justice Christian (image below, via Ebay) was 19th century Ireland’s most intellectually gifted and most cantankerous judge, simultaneously at war with the House of Lords (which had the power to overturn his judgments), his judicial colleagues (whom he did not rate highly) and the Irish Law Reports (regarding alleged misrepresentations of his judgments in their reports).

This most active of judicial disputants also conducted, through the letters pages of the Irish Times itself, an ongoing row with the Lord Mayor of Dublin regarding sewage problems in Merrion Square where he lived. He did, however, have an extremely happy family life, possibly due to his policy of remaining in his study most of the time when at home and avoiding dinner when company was present…