When Ridley was a young man, he converted from Judaism to Christianity and took a leading part in founding the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel Among the Jews.

[2] Farrer was educated at a grammar school in South London and attended lectures at the University of Bonn as a teenager, where his family lived for six months in 1852.

[3] In 1857 he took his BA degree with honours in Greek and mathematics at University College London, receiving prizes in logic and political economy.

[1] His fellow pupils included Archibald Levin Smith, subsequently Master of the Rolls, and Arthur Charles who became a judge of the Queen's Bench.

[1][6] However, Herschell soon made himself useful to Edward James, the then leader of the Northern Circuit, and to John Richard Quain, the leading stuffgownsman.

In February of that year there was a general election, with the result that the Conservative Party came into power with a parliamentary majority of fifty.

[2] Betting on the local support of the Cavendish family, he contested the North Lonsdale division of Lancashire, but in spite of the powerful influence of Lord Hartington, he was badly beaten at the poll.

[12] However, his first chancellorship lasted barely four months, because in June 1886 Gladstone's Home Rule Bill was rejected in the Commons and his ministry fell.

[13] In September 1893, when the second Home Rule BiIl came on for second reading in the House of Lords, Herschell took advantage of the opportunity to justify his own 1885 sudden conversion to Home Rule, and that of his colleagues, by comparing it to the Duke of Wellington's conversion to Catholic emancipation in 1829 and to that of Sir Robert Peel to Free Trade in 1846.

At the close of the argument of counsel, whom he had frequently interrupted, one of their lordships observed that although there might be a doubt as to what amounted to such molestation in point of law, the House could well understand, after that day's proceedings, what it was in actual practice.

His views of reform, according to Victor Dickins, the accomplished registrar of the university, were liberal and frankly stated, though at first they were not altogether popular.

[2] His characteristic power of detachment was well illustrated by his treatment of the proposal to remove the university to the site of the Imperial Institute at South Kensington.

He was chairman of the provisional committee appointed by Edward Prince of Wales to formulate a scheme for its organisation, and he took an active part in the preparation of its royal charter and constitution in conjunction with Lord Thring, Lord James, Sir Frederick Abel and Sir John Hollams.

He was the first chairman of its council, and, except during his tour in India in 1888, when he brought the institute to the notice of the Indian authorities, he was hardly absent from a single meeting.

[2] In 1897 he was appointed, jointly with Lord Justice Collins, to represent Great Britain on the Venezuela Boundary Commission, which met in Paris in the spring of 1899.

[20] His constitution, which at one time was a robust one, had been undermined by constant hard work, and proved unequal to sustaining the shock.

On 1 March, only two weeks after the accident, he died at the Shoreham Hotel, Washington, a post-mortem examination revealing heart disease.

[2] A funeral service held in St John's Episcopal Church, Washington, was attended by the president and vice-president of the United States, by the cabinet ministers, the judges of the Supreme Court, the members of the joint high commission, and a large number of senators and other representative men.