One of the most interesting rooms in England is that genuine fragment of the old Palace of Whitehall, the great dining-room at the Treasury in Downing Street-containing portraits of LordTreasurers and First Lords, now a very extensive series. It is a pity that there is no similar series at the Foreign Office-at the Admiralty-at the Horse-Guards;-but if the Cancellarian line from More to Lyndhurst were exhibited in one apartment, what a splendid procession it would be-what a field for the physiognomist! It is needless to say that they have been, with scarcely an exception, men of very extraordinary talents -but no rule, perhaps, admits fewer exceptions than that a great physique is indispensable for a great lawyer. Almost all of these have been men of athletic mould-not a few of them giants in body as well as mind-capable of and delighting in labour that would have baffled or soon killed off punier aspirants-addicted also to violent bodily exercise of some sort, and sustaining the eternal tear and wear of Herculean energies by abundant provender and still more copious potations. They have, moreover, been comely children of Anak-worthy to have been modelled by Roubilliac or Chantrey and painted by a Velasquez or a Grant. Sir Christopher Hatton, we suppose, was the only Chancellor who owed his dignity to his beauty; but if mere beauty had been the general principle for selection, not a few besides him might have left their effigies for the series that we desiderate. In various styles, but true specimens of the noblest of the human races, were without we believe one exception-all the most illustrious of our Chancellors-Ellesmere, Bacon, Clarendon, Somers, Cowper, Hardwicke, Eldon. Not less so several of the secondary names from Harcourt to Erskine. Even Jeffreys must have been a fine-looking man until the brandy took effect; and we may say the like of Northington, whose countenance stood the battery longer, as he adhered to port-which could never mar the Jove-like majesty of Thurlow's visage, nor the serene ivory of Eldon's beautiful lines. We dwell on this subject in the hope of stimulating Mr. Finden to give us a quarto of illustrations for our now completed Biographia Cancellariana. Every window sets forth Loves of the Poets,' 'Heroines of Rogers,' Land and Lasses of Burns,' 'Beauties of Moore,' &c., &c. Why not Beauties of Campbell, with cuts of the Homes and Haunts of the Clavis Regni?*

• Les

The remains of the most illustrious of these Homes and Haunts would not overtax an artist's patience. Small but exquisitely graceful is the existing fragment of the old Gorhambury. What a pity that the descendants of another great lawyer should have treated with such irreverence the favourite creation and ever-memorable retreat of

Bacon

'Les hommes et les nations,' says Bossuet, ont toujours eu des qualités proportionnelles à l'élévation à laquelle ils étaient destinés. Qui a prévu le plus loin, qui s'est le plus appliqué, qui a duré le plus long temps dans les grands travaux, à la fin a eu l'avantage. To this there have been few exceptions anywhere, and nowhere fewer than in the law of England.

As might be expected, and as all must be pleased to see established, he who is to reach the Marble Chair must, as the general rule, think of little but the law until eminence in his profession naturally invites or forces him to take an active part in politics. There are, however, several examples of men attaining the summit of legal ambition, although they had not settled themselves to legal study until after passing through a considerable period of dissipation; while others had given the vigour of early manhood to occupations more worthy, but still alien from the proper training for the woolsack.

Somers, though in boyhood noted among the friends of his domestic circle as an intellectual prodigy, did nothing to distinguish himself at school, nor while a young undergraduate at Oxford, and even after he was called to the bar he was thought of merely as a lively, agreeable Templar- the boon companion of profligates of rank much above his own, loose enough in his personal morals, and with little of fixed principle of any sort about him, excepting the hereditary Whiggery. Suddenly, from some cause left in the dark-but most probably either a disaster at the gaming-table or a rebuff in love-he seems to have awakened as from a dream, rubbed his eyes, and perceived that the sun was high in heaven and he yet a waster of the light. At four-and-twenty the barrister quitted the Temple -broke off at one plunge from all the entanglements of his London society-went back to his college, and there voluntarily submitted himself to a regular course of study-a solitary man with no company but his books and his old tutor. It was thus and then that he made himself the ripe scholar-it was thus also that he made himself the great civilian-the universal jurisconsult. When after the lapse of three or four years he re-appeared in town, he was seen to be another man: his father being a very prosperous solicitor at Worcester, he could not, now that

Bacon-clearing away as eyesores and abominations all vestiges of his evergreen labyrinths and trim gardens and stately sculptured terraces-leaving but one crumbling wall of a palace that might have lasted as long as Hatfield or Hardwickand substituting, among the shrubberies of a modern citizen, within a stone's-throw of the sad wilful ruin, a square, squat, comfortable tenement like a woolsack with windows!

VOL. LXXXII. NO. CLXIII.

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he desired it, be long without some opportunity of showing what was in him; a few appearances were sufficient to fix him in plentiful practice; and although Lord Campbell observes (obiter again) that the aristocratic Whigs have ever been slow to associate with themselves in high office any one who cannot boast of distinguished birth' (iv. p. 98)-every subsequent step-with the woolsack and earldom at the close-may be easily accounted for by the surpassing strength of his faculties, his unwearied diligence and honourable bearing in his profession, and the sharp adroitness of his political movements-all on the winning side.

Peter King, a grocer's son, and sent about the streets of Exeter, as soon as he could walk, with parcels of tea and sugar, was nevertheless a bookworm by nature-(his mother was Locke's sister) -and his parents at last gratified his inclinations by sending him to Leyden; but though he pursued his studies there with laudable ardour, there seems, from the direction they took, no reason to doubt the tradition that his views were fixed on the pulpit. He came back to England well seen in Hebrew and Divinity, and first made himself heard of by a ponderous Treatise on the Primitive Church. But as his Dutch education had confirmed him in the Presbyterian tenets of his family, and those tenets were manfully upheld in his Treatise-as soon as Charles II. had settled himself on the throne, it was clear that Peter King, if he took to the sacred office, must do so as a Dissenter-a line which offered no chance of wealth or distinction such as this pious predestinarian had always steadily aspired to. He therefore, by Locke's advice, tried Physic; but that study, in whatever way he set about it, did not please him; so at the age of thirty he was numbered in the ranks of the Law; and poring on in this new line with the unflinching assiduity of a Dutch commentator, his character as a profound black-letter jurist was by and bye established. His Dissenting friends could help him in the Western Circuit, and he presently acquired good employment in Westminster Hall too. Ten years after he was called to the bar we see him Sir Peter, Recorder of London, and one of the leading Whig counsel in the prosecution of Sacheverell. The rest followed very naturally.

Parker's early story is as striking. The son of a country attorney, he became an attorney at Derby himself, and so throve in his calling, that in no long time he had laid by as much money as he thought would be sufficient to support him for a certain number of years. And then he determined to set all upon a cast; he gave up his business-entered himself at an inn of court-laboured in the higher branches of legal study

most

most earnestly-and being at last called, and of course befriended by old friends among the solicitors, his progress was rapid. Within thirteen years he was Recorder of Derby and Member of Parliament for Derby, and of such eminence that the House appointed the silver-tongued Parker' one of the managers in the Sacheverell impeachment:-in which worthy concern he acquitted himself with higher applause than either Eyre or Jekyll or King; so much so that within the month-even before the judgment on Dr. Sacheverell was pronounced-he became per saltum ChiefJustice of England. Six years later he became Lord Macclesfield -and after two years more he was promoted, most unfortunately for himself, from the King's Bench to the Marble Chair. Though by no means the only attorney's son among the Chancellors, he is the only one who had himself been an attorney. Indeed Lord Campbell observes that, though there have been a few splendid exceptions, the failure of attorneys turned barristers is matter of proverb-the danger being, as he says, that a man who begins with the less liberal department of forensic procedure, may not be able to enlarge his mind so as to perform the duties of a good advocate, and that when pleading before a special jury or at the bar of the House of Lords, he may dwell earnestly on small and worthless points.' We are always glad to hear our author's practical remarks-a most keen observer of this world's doings he has ever been; and our readers will thank us for quoting also his speculations on the grand step of Parker in abandoning his business, which in extent and respectability equalled that of any attorney in Derbyshire :'—

'We may imagine that, when the assizes came round, he was at first struck with immense awe at beholding the Judges in their scarlet robes, and could scarcely venture to speak to the leaders of the Midland circuit on delivering them briefs in the causes which he had entered for trial; that his reverence for these dignitaries gradually dwindled away; that he began sometimes to think he himself could have examined witnesses quite as well as the barristers employed by him, and even by making a better speech to the jury have won verdicts which they lost; that he was likewise hurt by the distance at which he was in public kept by all members of the superior grade of the profession, while some of them were intensely civil to him in private; that he thought it hard, having with great labour prepared a case of popular expectation so as to insure victory, another should run away with all the glory; that he measured himself with those who were enjoying high reputation as advocates and had the prospect of being elevated to the bench; that, possessing the self-respect and confidence belonging to real genius, he felt himself superior to them; and that he sickened at the thought of spending the rest of his days in drawing leases, in receiving instructions from country bumpkins to bring foolish actions, in preparing briefs, and in making

out bills of fees and disbursements which any discontented client might tax before the Master. Whatever his train of feeling or of reasoning, he resolved that he would quit his position.'-vol. iv. p. 504.

Well for him if, quitting the position, he could also have quitted all the habits; and yet we agree with Lord Campbell in thinking that Macclesfield was hardly used in his impeachment. He had not originated any improper practice-he had only gone on in the line of his predecessors; and Sir Robert Walpole acted most shabbily in abandoning him-Walpole, whose whole government was notoriously, nay avowedly, carried on by means of bribes and corruption, and whose own immense accumulation of wealth during his tenure of office has never to this hour been in any shape or manner explained. The public were in a state of phrenzy at the explosion of the South Sea bubble. It was undeniable that Masters-in-Chancery had speculated with the suitors' funds. In the hope of the opportunity for such traffic the price hitherto given to the Chancellor for a Mastership had been raised; and no one would believe that the ci-devant attorney had not been quite aware of the reason why his own commodity came to fetch a higher sum in the forensic market. The Earl of Macclesfield therefore was to be the scapegoat--and he literally retreated into the wilderness. He never again was visible in the upper world-he never more inhabited either his London mansion or the palace he had acquired in the country-but shut himself up in a small hired house in one of the wildest glens of his native Derbyshire. There is an overawing effect in real shame and confusion of face-perhaps no circumstance in this book affects the reader more powerfully than the complete humility and darkness of this most energetic man's old age.

Of Parker's early refusal of an offer of the Great Seal from the Tories, Lord Campbell says

'He is much lauded for his virtuous self-denial, and it is sarcastically observed that "he is the first lawyer who ever refused an absolute offer of the Seals from a conscientious difference of opinion." I am very sorry to detract from his merit; but in the first place, principle not considered, he would have acted very foolishly to have given up his place of Chief Justice, which he held for life, in exchange for an office, the tenure of which would have been very insecure; for till after Guiscard's desperate attempt, Harley expected almost daily to be turned out;-and at any rate such a sudden change to the High Church party by the most distinguished manager of the late impeachment, would have reasonably led to the conclusion that he would give his first piece of preferment to the "Doctor," and would have covered him with such infamy that he must have been treated contumeliously by his colleagues, and kicked out by them whenever they wished to get rid of him.'-iv. p. 514.

-A notable