The Merry Tales of the Three Wise Men of Gotham

A want of sufficient confidence in their own opinions, appears to me another fault, which, however, almost deserves to be pardoned on account of its novelty. It has happened to me more than once, to hear a judge decide upon a case, on the ground of some recorded decision of another judge, when I myself would a thousand times rather have trusted it to his own unbiassed sense of right and wrong. It seems odd, to see a lawyer teaching a judge his lesson, out of a pile of books, and making him who is there as a master, appear more like a scholar, learning his alphabet from some beardless pedagogue.