mind was just, abborring any deviation from equity; his nature was noble, holding in utter contempt every thing low or base; his spirit was open, manly, honest, and ever moved with disgust at any thing false or tricky; his courage was high, leaving him more scorn than compassion for nerves less firm than his own. Nor was it only the thunder of his fierce declamation-very effectual, though somewhat clumsy, and occasionally coarse-with which he could prevail against an adversary, and master an audience. He had no mean power of ridicule,—as playful as a mind more strong than refined could make it; while of sarcasm he was an eminent professor, but of the kind which hacks, and tears, and flays its victims, rather than destroys by cutting keenly. His vigorous understanding, holding no fellowship with any thing that was petty or paltry, naturally saw the contemptible or inconsistent, and so ludicrous aspect of things; nor did he apply any restraint on this property of his nature when he came into stations where it could less freely be indulged. His interrogative exclamation in Lord Melville's case, when the party's ignorance of having taken accommodation out of the public fund was alleged -indeed was proved-may be remembered as very picturesque, though perhaps more pungent than dignified. Not know money? 'Did he see it when it glittered? Did he hear it when it chinked ?' On the bench, he had the very well known, but not very eloquent Henry Hunt before him, who, in mitigation of some expected sentence, spoke of some who complained of his dangerous elo'quence' 'They do you great injustice, sir,' said the considerate and merciful Chief-Justice, kindly wanting to relieve him from all anxiety on this charge. After he had been listening to two Conveyancers for a whole day of a long and most technical argument in silence, and with a wholesome fear of lengthening it by any interruption whatever, one of them in reply to a remark from another judge said, 'If it is the pleasure of your lordship that I 'should go into that matter.' We, sir,' said the Chief-Justice, 'have no pleasure in it any way.' When a favourite special pleader was making an excursion, somewhat unexpected by his hearers, as unwonted in him, into a pathetic topic-' An't we, 'sir, rather getting into the high sentimental latitudes now?'

It was observed with some justice, that his periods occasionally, with his manner, reminded men of Johnson. When meeting the defence of an advocate for a libel on the Prince Regent, that it had been provoked by the gross, and fulsome, and silly flattery of some corrupt panegyrist-What, said he, 'an offence against the law of ⚫ the land, provoked by an offence against the laws of taste! How frail is the nature by which men hold their reputation, if it may ' be worn down and compromised away between the mischievous

flattery of fulsome praise, and the open enmity of malignant 'abuse.' But it was observed with much less correctness that his sarcasms derived adventitious force from his Cumberland dialect. From his manner and voice, both powerful, both eminently characteristic, they assuredly did derive a considerable and a legitimate accession of effect. But his dialect was of little or no avail; indeed, except in the pronouncing of a few words, his solecisms were not perceivable. It was a great mistake to suppose that such pronunciations as Marchant, Hartford, were provincial; they are old English, and came from a time when the spelling was as we have now written the words. He was of those, too, who said Lunnun' and 'Brummagen;' but this too is the good old English dialect, and was always used by Mr. Percival, who never crossed the Trent except twice a-year going the Midland Circuit. Mr Fox, a lover of the Saxon dialect, in like manner, always so spoke-and preferred Caees, and Sheer, and Groyne, to Cadiz, Shire, and Corunna.

When his powerful mind was brought to bear upon any question that came before him, whether sitting alone at Nisi Prius, or with his brethren in Banc, the impression which he made upon it was immediate, sure, and deep. Sometimes it required the modification of the whole court revising what he had done alone; sometimes the interposition of his fellows sitting with him; but its value was always great, and no man doubted the energy or could avoid feeling the weight of his blows.

The Books are perhaps not the only quarters whither we should resort to find the memorials of a Chief-Judge's learning or talents for transacting judicial business. All that relates to sittings and circuits-that is, nearly two-thirds of his judicial labours, and by far the most important portion of them-leaves no trace whatever in these valuable Repertories of legal learning. Yet the Term Reports bear ample testimony to the vigour of this eminent individual's capacity, during the eighteen years that he filled the first place among the English judges.

His manner has been already mentioned in one particular. It was much more faulty in another. He was somewhat irascible, and occasionally even violent. But no one could accuse him of the least partiality; his honest and manly nature ever disdained as much to trample overbearingly on the humble, as to crouch meanly before the powerful. He was sometimes impatient; and, as his mind was rather strong than nimble, he often betrayed hastiness of conclusion more than he displayed quickness of apprehension. This slowness was shown by his actually writing his speeches for many years after he was a leader; and to the end of his professional life, he would occasionally commit to paper

portions even of his intended reply to the jury. It was a consequence of this power of his understanding, and of his uniform preference of the plain, sound, common-sense views which vigorous minds prefer, that refinements or subtleties were almost as little to his liking, as to the taste of his more cold and cautious successor. But he was not so much disturbed with them. They gave him little vexation, but rather contributed to his mirth, or furnished fuel for his sarcastic commentary. 'It was reserved (said he, respecting a somewhat refined and quite a new gloss upon a well known matter) It was reserved for the ingenuity of the 'year 1810, to hit upon this crochet.'

In his political opinions, Lord Ellenborough was originally like the rest of his family, a moderate Whig. But he never mingled in the associations or proceedings of party; and held an independent course, with, however, considerable disinclination, at all times, to the policy and the person of Mr. Pitt. He joined Mr Addington's Administration as Attorney-General, and came into Parliament, where he did not distinguish himself. Lord Kenyon's death soon after made way for him on the bench; and he was, at the same time, raised to the peerage. The quarrel

between that administration and Mr. Pitt did not reconcile him to that minister; and against Lord Melville he entertained a strong personal as well as party prejudice, which broke out once and again during the proceedings on his impeachment. The accession of the Whigs to power, in 1816, was accompanied by their junction with Lord Sidmouth; and, as he required to have a friend in the strangely mixed cabinet, the unfortunate choice was made of the first Criminal and Common Law Judge in the land, of whom to make a political partizan;—he whose high office it was to try political offences of every description, and among others the daily libels upon himself and his colleagues. This error has ever been deemed one of the darkest pages of Whig history. Mr Fox made a dexterous and ingenious defence, quoting a few special precedents against the most sound principles of the constitution; and defending an attempt at corrupting the pure administration of criminal justice by appeals to instances of Civilians and Chancery lawyers sitting in Parliament. But Lord Ellenborough's own son lately took occasion honestly to state that his father had told him, if it were to do over again, he should be no party to such a proceeding.

On the bench, it is not to be denied that he occasionally suffered the strength of his political feelings to break forth, and to influence the tone and temper of his observations. That he ever, upon any one occasion, knowingly deviated one hair's breadth from justice in the discharge of his office is wholly untrue. The

case which gave rise to the greatest comment, and even led to a senseless show of impeachment, was Lord Cochrane's. We have the best reason to know that all who assisted at this trial were in truth convinced of the purity with which the judicial duties were discharged, and the equality with which justice was administered. Lord Ellenborough was not of those judges who, in directing the jury, merely read over their notes and let them guess at the opinions they have formed;-leaving them without any help or recommendation in forming their own judgments. Upon each case that came before him he had an opinion; and while he left the decision with the jury, he intimated how he thought himself. This manner of performing the office of judge is now generally followed and most commonly approved. It was the course taken by this great judge in trying Lord Cochrane and his alleged associates; but if any of those who attacked him for it, had been present at the trial of the case which stood immediately before it or after it in the Paper, he would have found Lord Ellenborough trying that case in the self-same way—it being an action upon a bill of exchange or for goods sold and delivered.

Of the Government under which Lord Ellenborough made his entry into political life, Lord Liverpool was one of the most distinguished, useful, and respectable members. But before proceeding to record his merits and his defects, after having so long dwelt upon great English lawyers, we shall naturally enough be asked, if the ancient kingdom of Scotland has produced no lights of the law in later times-no worthy successors of the Stairs, the Hopes, the Dirletons, the Mackenzies, the Erskines of former times-that we must resort to the sister kingdom for our examples of judicial or of forensic renown? This warns us to do justice by our own countrymen—to look at home and at least to make a small selection from, and pourtray one or two favourable specimens of native, before continuing our sketches of foreign talent. Let it not be thought, that in only sketching Erskine and Blair, the list ofgdistinguished Scottish lawyers is limited to these two. No one who knows any thing of Lord President Campbell, of Lords Kames, Hailes, Monboddo, Braxfield, and Eldin, or of Mr William Tait, and Mr Matthew Ross, can entertain any doubt that the bench and the bar of those times were adorned by many [men of vigorous. and varied ability, profound learning, extensive capacity, and penetrating acuteness. But other reasons than the want of subjects, oblige us to limit ourselves to two whose very different characters and talents present some favourable points for contrasted delineation.

Exaggeration is ever hurtful to its object. It is foolish, then,

to pretend that there was any equality between the two celebrated brothers who, for so many years, filled the first stations at the Scottish and the English bar. But, as their talents were so different, that it is more easy to say in what they differed than where they were alike, so a just comparison can hardly be said to place one over or under the other, any more than if their pursuits had been wholly diverse. Henry Erskine had nothing whatever of the genius which marked his illustrious brother; it might not, indeed, be incorrect to say, that he was not a man of genius at all. But he was a man of splendid talents. The finest wit would have been his, had it only been trained in a more refined school, and exercised in a larger sphere, instead of being confined to a provincial one. Of a most ready as well as retentive memory; of a miraculous quickness of apprehension, if not always as sure as rapid; of perfect judgment and discretion, above all, in the management of causes, in the absolute prudence of conducting which he resembled—and in that almost alone resembled-his celebrated relation; of learning, such as our Scotch law learning is, quite enough to meet the ordinary demands of practice, though never making pretensions to the fame of a first-rate lawyer; of versatility much greater than his brother's, in as much as he could handle his subject in any way, and rather preferred the gay, the humorous, even the droll, to the serious and the pathetic; a great master of argument, greater than his brother, but diversifying it much less, with the flowers of imagination, his fancy being confined to happy allusion or effective jest; this eminent person enjoyed, for many long years, the undivided supremacy of our bar; rose rapidly to the place of Dean of Faculty, bestowed by the elective voice of the profession; and became Lord Advocate at one step, when his political friends acceded to power, upon the overthrow of Lord North's administration and the consequent removal of Mr Dundas.

As men will never allow any one to possess two qualities of an apparently incompatible kind, and, when they must make their election, find it easier to concede the faculty that pleases them best, it was the custom to say, 'The Dean is witty, not " a reasoner; he can joke, but is no great orator.' He was witty, but he was a close and a logical reasoner; he could joke, no man better, but he was an orator of a very high order. Full of life and vigour; actively searching and penetrating through his whole subject; ever keeping the cause in view, and never deviating from what could best serve its interests; abounding in happy illustrations from apt cases, strong analogies, striking comparisons; a very great master of the passions, when, which but rarely happened, he had occasion to work by them, or to.