how very different a line he would have taken in such a struggle with the commons, as his honest and patriotic successor has lately been engaged in, had he lived in these times of high parliamentary pretension. If we possess hardly any remains of Lord Mansfield's speeches at the bar or in Parliament, we have considerable materials from which to form an estimate of his judicial eloquence. The Reports of Sir James Burrows are carefully corrected, to all appearance; probably by the learned Judges themselves. Many of the judgments of the Chief Justice are truly admirable in substance, as well as composition; and upon some of the greater questions, his oratory rises to the full height of the occasion. It would be difficult to overrate the merit of the celebrated address to the public, then in a state of excitement almost unparalleled, with which he closed his judgment upon the application to reverse Wilkes's outlawry. Great elegance of composition, force of diction, just and strong but natural expression of personal feelings, a commanding attitude of defiance to lawless threats, but so assumed and so tempered with the dignity which was natural to the man, and which here, as on all other occasions, he sustained throughout, all render this one of the most striking productions on record. The courage, however, rested mainly, if not entirely, in the tone and the words; for, after disposing of the argument, and on all the grounds taken at the bar refusing the reversal, he arrives, by a short and unexpected byway, at the means of granting Mr. Wilkes's application; and he was therefore well aware, all the while, that he was reversing the accustomed relation of the suaviter and the fortiter; nor could be said to do otherwise than couch in the language of rebuke and refusal a full compliance with the popular demands. His character in private life was unimpeachable. He never had any children, but his domestic virtues were without a stain. His choicest relaxation was in the polished society of literary men and lovers of the arts; and his powers of conversation are extolled in all the traditions that have reached the present age, as of a very high order. That his manners were polished and winning can easily be believed from the impression his public appearances uniformly made. But when to these were added his great and various knowledge, chiefly of a kind available to the uses of society, his cheerful spirits and mild temper, his love of harmless pleasantry, and his power of contributing towards it by a refined and classical wit, it is not difficult to understand what the reports mean which unite in describing him as fascinating beyond almost all other men of his time. Through a vigorous constitution, upon which no excess of any kind, in mind or in body, had ever made inroads, he lived to an extreme old age, dying from exhausted nature when near ninety. He presided in court regularly till he reached his eighty-second year, and resigned formally in his eighty-fourth, having continued to hold his high office for two or three years longer than he ought to have done or could discharge its duties, in the hope of prevailing with the ministry to appoint his favourite Judge Buller his successor. But Mr. Pitt while at the bar, had seen things in that able and unscrupulous magistrate which made him resolve that no such infliction should fall on the English bench; and it is to his virtuous resolution that the preference of Lord Kenyon was due, which Lord Thurlow always arrogated to himself. It has become the more necessary to dwell at some length upon the history of this great man, because a practice has prevailed of late years in the profession which he adorned, and even upon the bench which he so much more than any of his predecessors illustrated, of treating him with much less respect than is his due. The narrow minds of little men cannot expand even to the full apprehension of that excellence with which superior natures are gifted, or which they have by culture attained. They are sufficiently susceptible however of envious feelings to begrudge virtue the admiration which it has justly earned; and jealous that any portion of applause should be drawn away from the puny technicalities of their own obscure walk, they carp at some trifling slips which may have been made in the less weighty matters of the law, the only portions their understandings can grasp. It has thus grown into a kind of habit with some men, very respectable in their own department, to decry Lord Mansfield as no lawyer, to speak lightly of his decisions, and to gratulate themselves that he did not intrude yet greater changes into our legal system by further departure from strict rules. But a more enlarged view even of the rigorous doctrines of our jurisprudence, will at once brush these cavils away, and show the truth of a position, ever denied by the vulgar both gowned and ungowned, that great minds may be as correct in details, as powerful to deal with the most general principles. |