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from systematic, prompt, and masterly. His mode of reasoning no one was ever yet found so hardy, or so greedy of ridicule, as to attempt to vindicate-or to deny that, when he had pronounced judgment, the powers of confusion and obscuration could go no further. His lordship's idiom of adjudication was (for it will, on individual collation of a selection from his judgments, be found that he had an idiom) to commence by leading forth, with ludicrous solemnity, a train of truisms, or at least of such propositions-some of them, however, not enjoying the merit even of relevancy-as form the stock of half a year's noviciate: from this he proceeded to declare the difficulty and distress which the necessity of decision had caused him, then he rambled about among the previous cases similar to that to be adjudicated, but not, as in the end it would appear, for the sake of any light which they might yield, but of the darkness, and to assist him in justifying another of his judicial failings, (proceeding from the same source as his indecision, timidity,) that of declining at all times, a general judgment; then, in pursuance of the same purpose, he fastened on some lateral, and almost alien, and, at any rate, insignificant peculiarity in the case, and professed to decide in reference to that only; taking pains to leave it understood, that, in what he had done, he had not intended to contravene former determinations. He would take into his hands the previous cases, chafe and strike them together until he had evaporated clouds, and evolved smoke enough to fill with darkness the atmosphere of the present case; then complain of the darkness, then pretend to see, and be delighted with the sight of a farthing candle glimmering at a distance, and then profess to have extricated himself by the aid of the farthing candle, without intending, however, the least disrespect to the sun. From this his lordship would proceed to renew his protestations about the difficulty of decision, and the distress of mind which the necessity for it had cost him; then to expatiate on that infirmity of his, his indecision, and habit of procrastination, for which he has been always so justly reproached by the public; season all this with some of those tears in which he had at all times a vested interest, and conclude with deprecating all confidence in his decision, and an earnest invitation to the party to whom his judgment was unfavourable to appeal to the House of Lords, or in fact to himself again!

We have before chosen to account, in some degree, for the success of Lord Eldon at the bar, from its low condition at the time of his lordship's accession to it. In a similar manner do we account for his lordship's long tenure of office. This we support by referring to the paucity, in the first place, of the professional adherents to that party to which his lordship belonged, and the individual poverty of talent of those few in the second. The only man among them, with pretensions to administer alarm to his lordship, was Sir W. Grant; and the same absence of ambition which parted him and his own office, left Lord Eldon safe in the chancellorship.

Of his lordship's habit of procrastination, the public was, a short time before it enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing him finally resign his pertinacious grasp of the great seal, presented with, to all but the parties who had to pay the expense of it, a ludicrous example. Mr. Wellesley had been left a widower with three children, who had been rendered wards of the Lord Chancellor. It is usual, however, to leave such wards to the care of their father, if they have one, unless the doing so be expressly objectionable. The children being under the care of their father, an application, founded on the alledged misconduct and objectionable habits of Mr. Wellesley, was made to Lord Eldon on the part of their aunts, for the removal of them. How, now, would Lord Hardwicke, or Sir W. Grant, have disposed of this question? They would have begun by proposing as a postulate, the primary right of the father to the care of his children unless there were some prevalent objection to it; they would then have described in detail the different objections proposed to Mr. Wellesley's conduct; determined which of them had been

established, and on which of them the proof had failed; then have estimated the effect, relatively to the question, of each of the established objections; then, if necessary, the joint effect of them; and, in the course of one morning's sitting (perhaps a long one) the question would have been disposed of. In place of this, not less than twenty days were engaged in the debate of this simple question! Of the three hundred and sixty-five days of the solar year, after deducting Sundays and holidays, not more than two hundred juridical days remain; so that one-tenth of the juridical year was consumed in the hearing and adjudication of this single application, and, consequently, his lordship received the amount of one-tenth of his annual judicial income for no more than this degree of public service!

We mean, advisedly, to say, that conscious as he could not fail to be of the presence of this infirmity (indecision), conscious too how utterly it disqualifies the patient for the due execution of the judicial office; in other words, to what unnecessary expense the suitor is subjected by it; and worse, to what unnecessary torture his mind is thereby exposed; it became the duty of Lord Eldon as a conscientious man (and he has ever been in the practice of referring on all occasions, on which in good taste it was allowable, to his conscience) to resign. That happier portion of the community which has never needed to invoke the justice of his lordship, can hardly be expected to be adequately aware of the amount of wretchedness which this infirmity is capable of inflicting; but the less fortunate residue must shudder at the recollection of the agony which accrues from the long repeated alternation of expectation excited, and expectation disappointed. The fruit, the recompense of all the expense and trouble, in which a suit in chancery involves the suitor, is the court's decree. Until this has been yielded, the proceeding, expensive and troublesome as it may be, is vain and barren. Mr. Angelo Taylor and Mr. John Williams, whose voices the thickening evils of the administration of the Court of Chancery in Lord Eldon's time would hardly ever allow to be silent, presented the House of Commons with a list (and every professional frequenter of the court during Lord Eldon's time, and many a suitor too, knows how due a representation it was) of causes in which the decrees had been due for years, and in some of which, days had been repeatedly appointed, on which the court had promised to deliver its judgment, and the expectant suitor had repeatedly attended, with his counsel and solicitors, at enormous expense, only to exchange his attendance for a new promise from his lordship.

Our estimate of his lordship is, that he was never any thing more than a person of ordinary abilities, joined to extraordinary prudence in the management of them; and, when it is considered how much may be effected even by such means, when exclusively dedicated (for his lordship's only pursuit has been that of his profession, and his whole stock of acquirements is purely professional) to one single object—and in addition to this, how much favoured he was by the low condition of the bar at the time of his accession to it-his success may be accounted for consistently with our opinion.

The correctness of this estimate of ours is convincingly proved to us by this that even from men of but ordinary genius, the grandeur of the occasion operating upon them, as the sight of a father's danger operated on his previously dumb son, has prompted such a display of power as enforced the admiration of mankind; and to men of truly great genius so prompted, it has happened, in the course of their lives, to signalize themselves by repeated proofs of their title to be so esteemed. Many have been the occasions which have presented themselves to Lord Eldon, in the course of his long professional and political career, in which the proudest efforts of his abilities would not only not have been supererogatory, but were even requisite: but, in what instance

was the performance sufficient to the occasion? In the case of the proposed bill of "Pains and Penalties" against the late queen, the utmost exertion of his lordship's abilities would not have been more than sufficient to reconcile the public to that insolent measure, or to justify, or palliate the part taken by him in the proceedings relative to it. How greatly did his achievements in that respect fail! Again, in the case of the opposition to the last bill for the relief of the Roman Catholics, on which occasion he had made the most lavish promises to demonstrate, in due time, how much that measure (proved by the event to be so innocuous) was to be dreaded, and how much it deserved to be condemned; how inferior to all that preparation was the performance! A speech consisting in a few of the very rawest assumptions, and two anecdotes proposed as most humourous and piquant, but not only in themselves sufficiently dull and vapid, but also not even relevant, was all he could give!! If we were to distribute the line of successive chancellors into classes, to be determined according to the different degrees in which they had contributed to their country's honour, and to assign to each of them his proper class, we should divide it into four classes, and into the fourth and lowest introduce the name of the Earl of Eldon. The first class should consist of Lord Bacon and Sir Thomas More; the second, we should compose of such men as Lords Somers, Hardwicke, Clarendon, Camden, and Erskine; the third class, of such as Lords Nottingham, Macclesfield, Talbot, and Thurlow; and the fourth should be supplied by such names as Lords Bathurst, Northington, Eldon, &c.

His lordship's apologists insist on the value of official industry, and challenge, in his behalf, the merit of a vast amount of this quality; and we have no doubt of their sincerity in thinking it to belong to him. Official industry we admit to be, in its degree, a public merit; but we deny that, in our sense of this quality (industry), his lordship was industrious. We beg to distinguish between business and work, and to be allowed to predicate industry, not of him who does much business but no work, but of him who demonstrates to us much work done, it may be with but little business. It is not the workman who continues to plod and toil with aching and weariness to himself, and whose work is ever to be done, who satisfies our idea of useful industry. We rather would assign this praise to him who, seen at intervals to loiter on the course, has, nevertheless, borne himself foremost to the goal: to him who, although seen at times to remit his labour, fills our eyes with the pile of his achievements. We admit Lord Eldon to have been incessantly busy; but is it possible to allow the claims of one on whose work, when done, so much time had been idly spent, and whose work was, moreover, ever in arrear, to the praise due to this, after all, but humble quality of a great man?

No man was so rich in the means of duly estimating Lord Eldon's worth as his long-worn companion, the late Lord Redesdale; a man moreover not disposed to spare the eulogy which could, with discretion, be bestowed. To Lord Eldon Lord Redesdale dedicated his last edition of his celebrated "Treatise of Pleadings," and, although, in compositions of that description, much latitude is assumed and allowed, and all the terms of encomium, which the understanding and conduct of the object of them can possibly justify, are usually invited to deck the pleasing theme, yet did Lord Redesdale, pretermitting all homage to his friend's understanding, content himself with ascribing to him only those two humbler graces of the judicial character, "Patience and Industry." Lord Redesdale was wise, and duly tempered his devotion: he knew that lavish flattery, or the imputation to him of virtues which were none of his, must taint his own sincerity, and bring no honour to his friend. But would you not, my good lord of Redesdale, have better consulted the honour of your friend, since truth forbade a richer, by withholding the tribute altogether, and rather leaving him "naked to his enemies," than

sending him stalking forth to the world, his aged brows crowned with this sickly wreath, and with so poor a retinue of panegyric? "This was the unkindest cut of all."

We have reflected how often it has happened, that some of those who would, if left to found their claims in nothing but the worth of their understandings, never have emerged from obscurity, have been lifted to pre-eminence by the force of their eloquence. To this cause, almost exclusively, was to be attributed the elevation of Lord Eldon's immediate predecessor, Lord Roslyn, who certainly was not to be esteemed a man of commanding understanding, and was never suspected of more than a moderate degree of professional knowledge. Indeed, there have been few occupants of the chancellorship who have not, in some degree, owed their attainment of it to this faculty. We have, accordingly, been inclined to account for the advancement of one so destitute of other qualities as Lord Eldon, to this cause; and yet we have never, during the time of our acquaintance with his lordship, been able to perceive either any proof of present, or symptom of departed, eloquence.

We are not old enough to have known Lord Eldon until after he had ascended the bench. If his lordship had ever been master of any eloquence, we think it must have survived the age at which our knowledge of him commenced. To the day of his death, almost, the eloquence of Chatham retained the same high strain; that of Fox had, to the last, remitted nothing of its energy; and had Erskine been left to exert his, in the only theatre in which his magic powers were ever seen to advantage, he would have been found still capable of kindling in juries the same impatience of state-craft and oppression, and turning the public gratitude upon his resistless exposure of them and yet the proud eloquence of these masters might be reasonably supposed more susceptible of deterioration and decay, than that of Lord Eldon's humbler and less ambitious species. We think we are right in concluding Lord Eldon never to have been eloquent: and yet, if his lordship had not possessed some degree of eloquence, we do not see how else he could have entitled himself to the very workmanlike beating of which Sir Robert Mackreth once made him a present. The story of this vapulatory recreation of Sir Robert is as follows:-Sir Robert became known to the public, or rather that happy portion of it which is sensible of the seraphic delights accruing from cheating and being cheated, through his occupation as a waiter at a gaming-house in St. James's Street. Here he contrived, by means of those arts and opportunities (whatever they be) which are employed by persons in that situation, to accumulate money, and was, at last, known to the public as Sir Robert Mackreth, Knight, a master of gaming-houses and other such establishments, a usurer, &c. In short, he was one of those convenient persons who accommodate gentlemen of little sense with losses, and afterwards with other losses, to enable them to satisfy the former. There must be many who remember Sir Robert, a nice little, squat, vulgar gentleman, dressed in the mode of a " dandy of the last preceding age; cocked-hat, ruffles, frill, his hair curled, where curled it ought to be, and frizzled where frizzled, and pomatumed, and powdered without stint. In front of all this fantastic pile of hair, the knight wore a large coarse face, the rubicundity of it being co-extensive with the face itself, and even invading his neck and ears, and behind the same hair depended an exuberant, and most lovely pig-tail. He wanted not the grace of large buckles at his knees, and on his shoes, nor any other decoration necessary to render his stock of elegancies complete.

The habits of Sir Robert, as it might naturally be expected they would, conducted him, in due course, into the Court of Chancery, where he was frequently invited to explain the process by which he qualified young gentlemen to enter into the honourable order of mendicants. The only failure of Sir Robert was a defect of modesty. Another man might have been content to enjoy in private the contemplation of

such fame as his, but he always chose to be present himself whenever his several exploits became the theme of description; which, so industrious had he been in his affecting occupation, was, at one time, generally about once a day. He was very punctual in his attendance too; and, while you were looking at the entry of the chancellor at one end of the ball, you might, at any time, expect to see the form which we have described introducing itself at the other. He must have been, to whomsoever had the honour to perform the office of cicisbeo to his different suits, a rich prize and as he appeared among the groups of attorneys in Lincoln's Inn Hall, they used to us to seem to eye him with something like the inward appetite with which a family of foxes may be supposed to privily contemplate a fat goose, observed waddling unconsciously along in the direction of their lair.

Among the others whom Sir Robert had accommodated in the manner before described, was a young gentleman of the name of Lane Fox. This gentleman Sir Robert had treated with some very handsome losses to himself, and then having persuaded Mr. Fox to commit to him the sale of his estate for the purpose of satisfying them, purchased it himself in a fraudulent manner. Sir Robert always used to "do the thing genteelly," and surely in such a case, more did not admit of being done. Fox was perverse enough not to like Sir Robert's snug mode of transacting business, and, for the vacation of the purchase, instituted a suit in chancery. His counsel were the late Sir James Mansfield, Mr. Scott, Mr. Lloyd, and the late Lord Redesdale, and, with their assistance, Fox obtained a decree. At the hearing of this cause, Sir Robert of course attended. Upon most persons a morning in that juridical pandemonium, the Court of Chancery, would operate as a sedative, but upon Sir Robert's temperament it had the effect of a stimulant. Sir Robert listened with undivided attention to the profound exposition made of the nature of his friendship for Fox; and, at the conclusion, was seen, instead of ruminating the ethical instruction which he had received, to proceed with brisk steps to a stick-shop! How a visit to a stick-shop should ever be consequential to attendance upon a debate in the Court of Chancery, or how the former should be connected with the latter is not, it must be owned, immediately apparent. This is to be explained. The compliments bestowed on Sir Robert were not so conceived as fully to satisfy his self-love, and his conduct had been characterised by the plaintiff's counsel in a manner not so well adapted to promote Sir Robert's purpose of defeating Fox's suit as he desired; and, from what hereafter appears, it is to be understood, that Mr. Scott had offended in this respect beyond the other three. Let us now join Sir Robert in the stick-shop: here we find him collating the sticks, and apparently consulting in the selection of one nothing but superior weight and toughness. At last he honoured with his preference one eminent before its fellows in these qualities, and having paid for it, and rehearsed, as persons who buy sticks are seen to do, the handling of it, he, with a Sardonic smile, repaired to Lincoln's Inn Fields, and to that side which is next to Lincoln's Inn Garden. Here he continued to loiter up and down, while, "ever and anon," a smile of the same inauspicious kind would play over his latitude of visage, and he would commence poising his stick, muttering to it an address of some sort, touching its future conduct. At four o'clock it is usual for counsel to exchange their chambers for their refectories. Shortly after that hour of the day on which the stick was purchased, a round-shouldered gentleman in black, with his eyes, as was their custom, directed towards the ground, was seen to set out from Lincoln's Inn on his route to Gower Street, his countenance beaming with the satisfaction of one silently reciting his epinician. He was now nearer and nearer approaching that point in his route where was posted the sturdy person who had lately called from its repose the portentous stick before-mentioned. On his arrival at this point, the " worthy Knight" commenced trying

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