Life of Sir Joseph Napier. By Alex. Charles Ewald. (Longnsans.)
—Joseph Napier, a scion of the famous stock of the Napier!' of Her- chistoun, was born in 1804. After a successful career at school and college, he won early distinction at the Bar. Plenty of work came at once into his hands, and before he was forty he was made famous by winning a great case (establishing the genera/ right of a prisoner to challenge jurymen), which he carried upon appeal to the House of Lords. In 1847, he was returned for the University of Dublin. To review his Parliamentary life would be to review the Irish, and, we might say, the European history of the next eleven years, for Napier took an interest in all the politics of the time. When Lord Derby came into power in 1858, the Lord Chancellorship of Ireland WWI offered to Napier. (He had previously been Attorney-General in
the short-lived Administration of 1852-53). His Chancellorship did not last long, and he bad then a secured leisure for the rest of his life. But he was a man who could always fill up leisure with useful work. But for a technical difficulty, indeed, he would have
been made a judicial member of the Privy Council. But the Act demanded the qualification of an English Judgeship, and the
subtle device which was practised in the case of Sir Hobert Collier had not yet been invented. In 1866, the Irish Chancellorship was again vacant; Lord Justice Blaokburne was appointed to it ; and Napier might have been expected to fill his post. But his deafness was made—as his biographer thinks—the pretext for giving it else- where. To put the matter more correctly, it was given and resigned.
In 1868, he received the seat in the Privy Council which he had mimed ten years before, and held it for eleven years. On December 11th, 1880, he died. Mr. Ewald has told the story of an honourable and
useful life with judgment and taste. We can only regret that SO excellent a biography has been embodied in a book of such a size that people are disposed to borrow rather than to buy it.
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