the Royal assent, and has since been followed as a precedent in two or three other cases of similar atrocity.'-vol. v. p. 473. Would that Lord Thurlow had oftener found such a reporter! What strong clear sense, and what sterling English! We are sorry not to quote the most striking description of his mode of addressing the House of Lords, which occurs in Lord Brougham's Sketches; but we must keep our space for our Campbell, and give another favourable specimen of this Essay on Thurlow-to wit, the account of his first start of professional success (1761). Every reader of Cowper's Letters knows how little of labour apparently entered into his more fortunate companion's early course of life: 'According to legal tradition, soon after the decision of the Court of Session in Scotland that the alleged son of Lady Jane Douglas was a suppositious child purchased at Paris, the question, which excited great interest all over Europe, was discussed one evening at Nando's coffeehouse--which, from its excellent punch, and the ministrations of a younger daughter of the landlady, was Thurlow's favourite haunt. At this time, and indeed when I myself first began the study of the law, the modern club system was unknown; and (as in the time of Swift and Addison) men went in the evenings for society to coffee-houses, in which they expected to encounter a particular set of acquaintance, but which were open to all who chose to enter and offer to join in the conversation, at the risk of meeting with cold looks and mortifying rebuffs. Thurlow, like his contemporary Dr. Johnson, took great pains in gladiatorial discussion, knowing that he excelled in it, and he was pleased and excited when he found a large body of good listeners. On the evening in question, a friend of his at the English bar strongly applauded the judgment against the supposed heir of the house of Douglas. For this reason, probably, Thurlow took the contrary side. Like most other lawyers he had read the evidence attentively, and in a succinct but masterly statement he gave an abstract of it to prove that the claimant was indeed the genuine issue of Lady Jane and her husband,-dexterously repelling the objections to the claim, and contending that there were admitted facts which were inconsistent with the theory of the child being the son of the French rope-dancer. Having finished his argument and his punch, he withdrew to his chambers, pleased with the victory which he had obtained over his antagonist; and went to bed, thinking no more of the Douglas cause, and ready, according to the vicissitudes of talk, to support the spuriousness of the claimant with equal zeal. But it so happened that two Scotch law agents, who had come up from Edinburgh to enter the appeal, having heard of the fame of Nando's, had at a side-table been quiet listeners of the disputation, and were amazingly struck with the knowledge of the case and the acuteness which Thurlow had exhibited. The moment he was gone they went to the landlady and inquired who he was? They had never heard his name before; but finding that he was a barrister, they resolved to retain him as junior to prepare the appellant's Case, and to prompt those who were to lead it at the bar of the House of Lords. A difficulty had occurred about the preparation preparation of the Case, for there was a wise determination that, from the magnitude of the stake, the nature of the question, and the consideration that it was to be decided by English law lords, the plaidoyer should be drawn by English counsel, and the heads of the bar who were retained-from their numerous avocations-had refused to submit to this preliminary drudgery. 'Next morning a retainer, in Douglas v. The Duke of Hamilton, was left at Thurlow's chambers, with an immense pile of papers, having a fee indorsed upon them ten times as large as he had ever before received. At a conference with the agents (who took no notice of Nando's), an explanation was given of what was expected of him,-the Scotchmen hinting that his fame had reached the Parliament House at Edinburgh. He readily undertook the task, and did it the most ample justice, showing that he could command, upon occasion, not only striking elocution, but patient industry. He repeatedly perused and weighed every deposition, every document, and every pleading that had ever been brought forward during the suit, and he drew a most masterly Case, which mainly led to the success of the appeal, and which I earnestly recommend to the law student as a model of lucid arrangement and forcible reasoning. 'While so employed he made acquaintance with several of the relations and connections of the Douglas family, who took the deepest interest in the result; and, amongst others, with the old Duchess of Queensberry, the well-known friend of Gay, Pope, and Swift. When she had got over the bluntness of his manners (which were certainly not those of the vieille cour), she was mightily taken with him, and declared that since the banishment of Atterbury and the death of Bolingbroke, she had met with no Englishman whose conversation was so charming. She added that, being a genuine Tory, she had considerable influence with Lord Bute, the new favourite, and even with the young Sovereign himself, who had a just respect for hereditary right, lamenting the fate of the family whom his own had somewhat irregularly supplanted. On this hint Thurlow spoke, and, with the boldness that belonged to his character, said that a silk gown would be very acceptable to him." Her Grace was as much surprised as if he had expressed a wish to wear a silk petticoatbut upon an explanation, that the wished-for favour was the appointment to the dignity of King's Counsel, in the gift of the Government, she promised that it should be conferred upon him. And she was as good as her word.'-vol. v. pp. 489-491. To this Douglas Cause, then, Thurlow owed both his silk gown and his adoption of the Tory politics-whence the Great Seal in due season. The Duchess, who in early life enjoyed the society of Swift, was not likely to be much repelled by bluntness of manner in Thurlow. As to her alleged account of George the Third's views and feelings concerning the exiled Stuarts at the beginning of his reign, we should have liked to be told on what authority the statement is ascribed to her Grace; but at the same time, were the story ever so clearly brought brought home to her, we must beg to be excused for slowness of acceptance. Duchess Kitty's eccentricity, even in her early period, was egregious; and Quevedo long ago observed, that if the girl squints with one eye the grandame will be likely to squint with two. Before we turn from the Second Series (published in 1846) we may observe that throughout his lives of the Chancellors of the old Revolution school, Lord Campbell is forced to acknowledge that, on the two grand political questions still uppermost in public interest, all those venerated ornaments of his party maintained opinions diametrically the reverse of their more enlightened successors, the liberal Whigs of our own æra. He cannot obscure the fact, for example, that the AntiCatholic legislation of Somers was infinitely severer than even Queen Elizabeth's-under the urgency of Philip's aggressive ambition, and when the dethroning Edicts of the Vatican were wet from the press-had ever been (vol. iv. p. 226). All he can say is that in those times the general feeling among English Protestants with respect to Roman Catholics resembled what now prevails in the United States of America among the whites with respect to the negroes;' and that the authors of such measures had no consciousness of doing anything wrong'-meaning perhaps to insinuate that persons who in more recent days avowed their suspicion that the Papal virus was not extinct, and opposed accordingly the full admission of Romanists to all the political franchises of a constitution which the Somerses founded on the very principle of Protestantism, were conscious that in acting on such grounds 'they were doing wrong.' In like manner he cannot help allowing that all the old Whig worthies were resolute Protectionists. When obliged (vol. iv. p. 590) to recount the successful energy of the stand made by King (with Stanhope and other associates) against certain articles in the Treaty of Utrecht, providing that in future no higher duties should be imposed on any goods imported from France than on the like goods from any other country in Europe,' he suggests that the bad political economy of his brother barrister 130 years ago may be forgiven, when we see an enlightened nobleman in the middle of the nineteenth century, still condemning the clauses in question;' and he quotes with an air of triumph a few words of what we still think a very sensible passage, in which Lord Mahon observes that the clauses would have involved 'a direct violation of the Methuen Treaty, and this violation would of course have lost the English all their trade with Portugal, which was then by far the most thriving and advantageous they possessed;' that, moreover, our rising manu factures factures of silk, linen, and paper were threatened with unequal competition and probable ruin;' and that the practical men of business-who in that unenlightened age were usually preferred to theorists and speculators-with scarcely an exception viewed the project with dismay.'-(Mahon, vol. i. p. 49.) Lord Campbell often shows so much candour, and, on the whole, is so little chargeable (for a voluminous Whig) with exhibitions of presumptuous dogmatism, that we regret to find him on any occasion adopting the crowing self-sufficient air of our vulgar talkers and writers on subjects of this particular class. arrogance seems unworthy of him who, having a seat in Lord John Russell's Cabinet, has the manliness to express, in not a few places, his regret for the close boroughs scheduled away in 1832. After confessing, for instance, in his fourth volume, that the spotless puritan King was, even when Chief Justice, a most diligent dealer in the traffic of boroughs, and that but for Berealstone the splendid name of Cowper would never have graced his book or our peerage, his lordship honestly says Such It was entirely close, and was one of a class of boroughs so convenient and useful that we cannot help sometimes regretting the scandal which rendered their abolition necessary; for I fear we cannot deny that they sent to parliament members more eloquent and better qualified to serve the state than the new boroughs with larger constituencies which have been substituted for them.'-vol. iv. p. 287. We hope and believe he would have published the foregoing sentence, although he had still in 1846 continued Plain John,' member for Edinburgh. One could hardly have expected him to add, that no admirer of our ancient constitution can help regretting the line taken by the Tory Government as to the East Retford case-which enabled the Whigs to re-awaken the almost forgotten cry of Reform, and, by fanning the sacred flame' of the Three Days of July, to force on a popular movement, whereof the natural fruit is now visibly ripening-to the equal alarm, as we believe, of Whig and Tory. So much for the second livraison, in which, though from the nature of the materials it could not come up to the picturesque interest of the first, we must say that the author has represented, in a style eminently free and masculine, a long line of very important and very oddly diversified personages. Of his by-play we have, we suppose, given sufficient examples; perhaps indeed some of our readers may be inclined to think that several of its closest girds might as well have been reserved for the anteprandial fencing-bouts of the House of Lords. We may suggest, at parting, that in the next edition a good deal of space might be gained by abridging the notes devoted to mere transcripts transcripts of the formal official records of the elevation of successive Chancellors, and other documents of a similar class. It was right to afford a specimen or two of such things, but it is wearisome enough to have the very same bald stuff repeated on every change in the custody of the Seal from Edward III. to George IV.; and we can hardly speak otherwise of the eternal details of inauguratory processions and banquets. It looks as if the writer had a sort of hankering after the pomps and vanities quite out of keeping with his usual sturdy common sense, and enjoyed dallying in imagination with the weight of the embroidered purse and the grandeur of the mace in the coach. Why the mention in his text of some legal festivities a hundred years ago should authorise a note of two or three pages about Prince Albert's dinner at Lincoln's Inn, we are quite at a loss to conjecture. Surely it was not enough that among the dignitaries present at this recent display the record so painfully transcribed happened to include the name of Lord Campbell. The fifth volume, as we have seen, includes the life of one whom the biographer had looked upon in the flesh as an exChancellor. The sixth opens with him who had just been removed-multum gemens-from the Woolsack on the day when the long-retired Thurlow once more electrified the House of Lords, in the presence (luckily for us) of a certain very promising student-of-law. This was Alexander Wedderburn, Lord Loughborough-for our author keeps by that historical title, though after he lost the Seal he became Earl of Rosslyn-just as he had in a former volume given us Ellesmere, not Brackley ;and Lord Bacon, not the Viscount of St. Alban's. Loughborough occupies half this volume-the rest is for Erskine. The latter is taken out of his order-for Eldon preceded him in the high place, but he died in 1807, whereas Eldon's public career continued for thirty years later, and the arrangement adopted was of course more convenient with reference to history. Erskine's tenure, moreover, was but a brief interruption of the long Eldonian reign-and one in itself so insignificant, that if the actual Chancellorship had been the only point, we doubt whether Lord Campbell could have ventured to pronounce old John Searl the obscurest of the Chancellors.' With respect to occupying the whole of the sixth volume with only two Lives, we must recollect that Loughborough was the first Scotchman who ever reached the Woolsack, and Erskine the second. It is also to be observed, however, that for Scotch biographies the author had more than common facilities; and we must say that he has handled both stories with uncommon vivacity of effect. That |