missionership of Bankrupts. He said he would, but never did. When afterwards Lord Eldon inquired of him the reason, he said, "It would have been your ruin. Young men are very apt to be content when they get something to live upon. When I saw what you was made of, I determined to break my promise, and make you work." "And I dare say," says Lord Eldon, "he was right; for there is nothing does a young lawyer so much good as to be half starved; it has a fine effect: but it was rather a curious instance of Lord Thurlow's kindness."

In 1783, when the Coalition Ministry came in, he received the offer of a silk gown, together with Mr. Erskine and Mr. Pigott. He had now completed his thirty-second year. He accepted about the same year a seat for the borough of Weobly, on the patronage of Lord Weymouth. When he got to the place, he says, he asked what was the usual mode of proceeding there, and he was told, he was to go first to the house which contained the prettiest girl in the place, and give her a kiss. "This," says he, "I thought a very pleasant beginning, and I did so." From Carey Street he had moved to the more agreeable situation of Powis Place, joining Great Ormond Street. His maiden speech he made on the second reading of Mr. Fox's India Bill. Mr. Fox complimented him on his abilities and his goodness;" but his second attempt at eloquence was more ambitious than successful, overrun with quotations and far-fetched allusions, in which he quoted Shakspere and Horace, likened the East India Company to the Great Babylon, and found a type of their affairs in the mysterious prophecies of the Apocalypse. The House listened with amazement, and Sheridan retaliated in a shower of sarcasm and wit. This put an end for ever to Mr. Scott's attempts at eloquence. In 1786 we find him going the circuit as usual, and joining in the parliamentary debates. He took little part in any of the charges against Mr. Hastings. In 1787 he received the office of Chancellor of the Bishopric of Durham, vacant by the death of Mr. Justice Willes. In June 1788 he was appointed Solicitor-General by Mr. Pitt, and received the honour of knighthood. It is said that he hinted to the King his wish to decline it, who answered in the regal style," Pooh, pooh! nonsense," and put the sword on his shoulder. In 1758 and 1789 he was engaged in the important discussions on the Regency, in consequence of the King's malady.*

In 1791, in consequence of urgent increase of business, he took a set of chambers in the New Square, Lincoln's Inn. His fortune now must have rapidly accumulated, for in July 1792 he bought the Eldon estate, from which subsequently he took the title. This cost him 22,000l. In 1793 he became Attorney-General, on Sir Archibald Macdonald's promotion, Sir John Mitford succeeding him as Solicitor-General. In March 1793 he introduced the measure known as the "Traitorous Correspondence Bill," and, in his high and responsible office, he conducted the well-known prosecution in 1795 against Horne Tooke, Hardy, &c. for treason. So high was public feeling at this time, and so exasperated was the mob-the plebs Londinensis--at the prosecution of their favourite leaders, that Mr. Scott's life was, when he left the court, in no little danger. Mr. Erskine," he says, "behaved generously and gallantly throughout the excitement. When the people were

* In this part of the narrative Lord Eldon has defended his old friend Lord Thurlow from the imputation, so industriously propagated and so firmly believed, of double dealing, while in the ministry, with the Prince's party. He said he never could find out what occasioned the rupture between Lord Thurlow and his colleagues. Vide vol. I. p. 212.-REV.

GENT. MAG. VOL. XXIII.

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about to stop Sir John Scott. Mr. Erskine called out to them, 'I will not go on without the Attorney-General.' Erskine," says Scott, " caused his carriage to go slowly, till he saw me out of danger." This, he says, was the most important proceeding he was ever professionally engaged in. The Treasonable Attempts Bill was now brought in and carried, which arose from the daring attempts made on the King's person, and the Seditious Meetings Bill was renewed. In May Parliament had been dissolved, and the Attorney-General was returned to Parliament for Boroughbridge in Yorkshire, with Sir F. Burdett as his colleague. In 1798 he served the office of Treasurer, that is, Principal, of the Society of the Middle Temple. In the spring of 1796 a prosecution for high treason was instituted against Mr. Arthur O'Connor, Rev. J. O'Coighley, &c. and, though five prior prosecutions of the same kind by Sir John Scott had all failed, in this case one of the prisoners was convicted. The year 1799 was fruitful in political prosecution. Gilbert Wakefield was tried for sedition, convicted, and imprisoned; and the effect of this imprisonment, through his own imprudence when he was liberated, cost him his life. He was an indefatigable and most zealous scholar, widely read in the ancient authors, and possessing a vast and retentive memory; but he had no selection in his literature, and little taste in his criticisms. He seemed always to read and write in haste; hence his Latinity was often faulty, and his emendations improbable. In his two years' imprisonment he solaced himself with his favourite authors, and as soon as he was free, in his desire to select a residence, overheated himself by exertion, and caught a fever which was soon fatal. In May 1799 Sir John Scott made his last speech in the House of Commons respecting the claims of Mr. Palmer on the Post Office, thus completing his sixteenth year of parliamentary service. In his office of Attorney-General he had been making about ten thousand a year; but on the Chief Justiceship of the Common Pleas becoming vacant he succeeded to it, and took the title of Lord Eldon. In July he was sworn of the Privy Council. His patent of peerage is dated on the 18th. He took his seat in the House of Lords on 24th September. Lady Eldon, who, with the natural partiality of a wife, thought highly of her husband's personal appearance, could not bear the idea of his handsome features being enveloped in the hairy circumference of a judge's wig. In consequence, Lord Eldon asked the King's permission to lay aside that part of his dress. On the King's objecting, he observed that in King Charles's time the judges did not wear wigs; "True," said the King, "and I am willing, if you like it, that should do as they did, for, though they certainly had no wigs, they wore their beards." When he became Chancellor, the wig of private life was discontinued. At the close of 1799 he lost his brother Harry Scott, to whom he was much attached; and the next year his aged mother paid the debt of nature. In March 1801 Mr. Pitt announced that his ministry was at an end; the cause being his difference with the King on the Roman Catholic question. Lord Loughborough resigned the Great Seal, to which Lord Eldon was elevated. He was in April 1801 appointed by George the Third one of the trustees of his private property, and in July the High Stewardship of the University of Oxford was conferred upon him, with a salary of 57. per annum. in May 1802 he was appointed Governor of the Charter House. The high honours, however, of his exalted station were not to be maintained without corresponding labour; a labour that seemed sometimes even beyond the powers of nature to endure. Let us hear the Chancellor's own statement to a female friend, Mrs. Forster.

you

"After all, Mary, I think I am wonder. ful, considering how much I have gone through; for mine has been no easy life. I will tell you what once happened to me. I was ill with the gout; it was in my feet, so I was carried into my carriage, and from it I was carried into my Court. There I remained all the day, and delivered an arduous judgment. In the evening I was carried straight from my Court to the House of Lords: there I sat until two o'clock in the morning, when some of the Lords came and whispered to me that I was expected to speak. I told them I really could not, I was ill, and I could not stand; but they still urged, and at last I hobbled, in some way or other, with their assistance, to the place from which I usually addressed the House. It

was an important question, the peace of Amiens-I forgot my gout, and spoke for two hours. Well, the House broke up, I was carried home, and at six in the morning I prepared to go to bed. My poor left leg had just got in, when I recollected I had important papers to look over, and that I had not had time to examine them; so I pulled my poor left leg out of bed, put on my clothes, and went to my study. I did examine the papers; they related to the Recorder's report, which had to be heard that day; I was again carried into Court, where I had to deliver another arduous judgment, again went to the House of Lords, and it was not till the middle of the second night that I got into bed. These are hard trials to a man's constitution."

Let him who aspires to the highest stations of professional eminence recollect also the arduous duties that accompany it, for to every conscientious mind they are inseparably joined; and he who would endeavour to separate them, would find himself in deeper troubles than those he had vainly attempted to evade. When Lord Thurlow was asked howhe got through his business as a Chancellor, he said, "Just as a pickpocket gets through a horsepond,-he must get through." In 1804 the King was again suffering under his dreadful affliction; and the Chancellor says, "God grant that no future Chancellor may go through the same distressing scenes, or be exposed to the dangerous responsibility which I went through, and was exposed to during the indispositions of my sovereign." Lord Eldon related to Lord Encombe, that the King used to say that he had had one advantage from his mental afflictions; viz. the means of knowing his real from his pretended friends. In 1804 the force of circumstances alone, and not the King's will or favourable disposition, prevailed to place Mr. Pitt again in power; for kings will always be served by men of moderate talents and flexible wills if they can; they don't like the uncompromising character of great and lofty minds; George the Third neither liked Lord Chatham nor his son; and in one passage of this work he complains that one of the new ministry (meaning, doubtless, Lord Grey) came up to him as Bonaparte would after the battle of Austerlitz. In 1804 much of his time was taken up by the differences between the King and the Prince of Wales. The chief event in his domestic life, was the marriage of his eldest son with Miss Ridley. In 1805 he made his first speech against the Roman Catholic Claims, which were brought forward by a petition presented by Lord Grenville. Then followed the very annoying business of the accusation against Lord Melville, his resignation, and the consequent loss to the Cabinet of his energy and talent. Mr. Pitt's rapidly declining health was also a source of great uneasiness to Lord Eldon; but he was soon visited by a deeper affliction in the illness and death of his eldest son, who died in December 1805. On the 23rd of January Mr. Pitt breathed his last. Then came the change of administration. Mr. Fox and Lord Grenville came into power, and Lord Erskine was appointed to the Chancellorship. On the 4th February Lord Eldon took leave of the Bar, and became consequently entitled to a pension of 40007. a-year. We must go now more rapidly through the remainder of the narrative. In 1806 we find Lord Eldon engaged in correspondence

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with Caroline, Princess of Wales, on the subject of the charges brought against her. In 1807 the Whig ministry was dismissed, and he again took the Great Seal: he bought the Encombe estate, in Dorsetshire, of Mr. Morton Pitt, for 53,000l. thinking that its size and character suited him well. In the session of 1808 we find him defending the Orders in Council, and the somewhat difficult point of the seizure of the Danish fleet. What the King thought of the act may be seen in a conversation he had with our ambassador, Mr. Jackson, who waited on the Prince Royal to demand the ships. "Was he up stairs or down when he received you?" asked the King. "He was on the ground-floor, please your Majesty." I am glad of it, for your sake," said the King, for, if he had half the spirit of George the Third, he would infallibly have kicked you down stairs." In 1809 the Chancellor was engaged in defending his friend the Duke of York against Col. Wardle's charges. After this came the serious misunderstanding between Lord Castlereagh and Mr. Canning, which ended in their mutual resignation and the consequent confusion of the Cabinet. In October the Duke of Portland died, and the Marquess Wellesley and Mr. Perceval formed the new administration. At the close of the year Lord Eldon stood for the Chancellorship of Oxford against Lord Grenville and the Duke of Beaufort, and the reasons for his want of success are detailed in Mr. Twiss's volume. He again in 1810 opposed the petition of the Catholics: next year the illness of the King took a character of decided permanence, and the Regency question, with its powers and limitations, became the subject of long deliberation and violent dispute. When that was settled other difficulties disappeared, as the Prince Regent continued Mr. Perceval's administration. The only material change that took place was the retirement of the Marquess Wellesley, who was succeeded by Lord Castlereagh. In May 1812 Mr. Perceval was shot in the lobby of the House; he was the principal adviser of the Government, and his loss was deeply felt; his character is fairly drawn, we think, in the book, and we shall give it at the close of our article, together with some others. After much fruitless negotiation to form a stronger administration from the junction of Lord Wellesley and Mr. Canning, and subsequently of the Whig leaders, Lord Liverpool took the place of Mr. Perceval, and this administration, which it was said at the time would not weather the Session, lasted fifteen years afterwards, without any material change of policy except the recognition of the Roman Catholic question, and without any important additions except the return of Mr. Canning in 1816, the entrance of the Duke of Wellington in 1818, and of Sir R. Peel in 1822. We must pass over the next two years, in which nothing very important took place, although the long and fatal war was terminated, and the Bourbons were replaced on the throne of France; but in these great events Lord Eldon of course did not appear as a prominent person, for the country was now taken out of Chancery, and he was in it. În 1815 Lord Eldon's house was forcibly entered and taken possession of by a violent and angry mob, infuriated with the Corn Bill; his family took refuge in the British Museum gardens, and the arrival of the foot soldiers and horse-guards alone preserved the dwelling of the Chancellor from destruction. Under the date of this year, 1815, will be found an interesting correspondence between Lord Eldon and his brother relating to the grounds on which the captivity of Bonaparte should be founded. Mr. Twiss says, "It is a great evidence of Lord Eldon's extraordinary powers, that he should have been able, out of a mass of perplexities which had

baffled Lord Ellenborough, Sir William Grant, and Sir W. Scott, to deduce a solid, comprehensive judgment of his own-reconciling the multifarious difficulties of the law of nations, and setting the sanction of justice to the tranquillity of the world."

Lord Eldon's wish for retirement, which he had for some time entertained, appears to have been increased by a long illness, which attacked him in the autumn of the year 1816. He was soon, however, restored to health by medical treatment; but it unfortunately was only to witness an event that much displeased him, the marriage of his eldest daughter with Mr. George Repton. This he never forgave; no doubt that to him it appeared at once imprudent and unkind; imprudent as forfeiting all the advantage of her rank and station and fortune, and unkind to him who had always treated her not only as his daughter, but his friend; he who has daughters must not be surprised sometimes at such amiable weaknesses appearing;-but it appears to us that the only true ground of a father's alienation must be when a step of folly destroys every feeling of that respect on which even affection itself reposes. In June 1819 he again opposed further concession to the Catholics; he appears, however, in this session to have been overpowered by labour: he writes to his brother, "Town, or this world, I must leave-such is my state: and I hope, when I do leave it, to return no more to labour without ceasing from seven in the morning of the 28th October to nine at night of the 31st August. I can't bear it longer-it's impossible." Before he went into Dorsetshire he quitted Bedford Square for Hamilton Place, which he occupied till his death. In 1820 his youngest daughter married Mr. Edward Bankes. Lord Eldon kept up a correspondence with her, very minute and unreserved, which has enriched the pages of this biography with some of its most valuable matter. The Chancellor was not to be happy in his daughters' marriages. She and her husband disagreed and separated. These things all depend on whether Juno or the Eumenides attend the marriage feast.* The parent's love, however, was altogether undiminished. From this time his attention was almost entirely engrossed, together with that of King, ministers, people, and parliament, by the claims and conduct of Queen Caroline. It was a sad subject for the Ministry: we well remember the then first Lady Liverpool, when she witnessed the dreadful anxiety and constant distress of the Earl, used to repeat, "Oh ! that woman!" for she believed in her guilt, and therefore in her conduct saw nothing but the grossness of personal audacity and the exasperation of party feeling. George the Fourth, in acknowledgment of Lord Eldon's great services, conferred the dignity of an Earldom upon him. In August the Queen died of internal inflammation;† had she lived she intended in a few days to have left the country for the continent, and all preparation was made for the expedition. In 1822 a section of the Grenville party gained the Ministry, and Mr. Peel accepted the office of Home Secretary

The Queen, after retiring from the play, mixed and drank a tumbler of magnesia and water, upon that she swallowed another of diluted laudanum; this occasioned a complete stoppage in the bowels. We had this from a lady who was living with her at the time.-REV.