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 illus

trated, 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.

215

LORD CHIEF JUSTICE GIBBS.

Or the class of the inferior though able men to whom we have just referred, the late Sir Vicary Gibbs was certainly among the most eminent; and he had all the perfections of the order, and more than the ordinary share of its faults. It is a great error, committed only by those who view them from afar off, to imagine that their learning is of a confined nature, either in their own profession or in other branches of education. They are in no respect mere special pleaders, or men familiar only with the practice of the courts. They are even in some respects not to be termed mere lawyers. They are acquainted with the whole of the law, which they have studied accurately, and might also be admitted to have studied profoundly, if depth can be predicated of those researches, which, instinctively dreading to penetrate the more stubborn and more deep-lying vein of first principle, always carry the labourer towards the shallower and softer bed that contains the relics of former workmen, and make him rest satisfied with these patterns as the guide and the rule. All that has been said or written, however, by text men or by judges, they know; and of it all, much practice has given them great expertness in the application. Then their education has not been confined to mere matter of law. It has indeed been far from a very enlarged one; nor has it brought them into a familiar acquaintance with the scenes which expand the mind, make it conscious of new powers, and lead it to compare, and expatiate, and explore. Yet has this course of instruction not been without its value;

for they are generally well versed in classical literature, and often acquainted with mathematical science. From the one, however, they derive little beside the polish which it communicates and the taste which it refines; from the other, they only gain a love of strict and inflexible rules, with a disinclination towards the relaxation and allowances prescribed by the diversities of moral evidence. From both they gather a profound deference for all that has been said or done before them, an exclusive veneration for antiquity, and a pretty unsparing contempt for the unlettered and unpolished class which form and ever must form the great bulk of mankind in all communities. A disrespect for all foreign nations and their institutions has long been another appointed fruit of the same tree; and it has been in proportion to the overweening fondness for everything in our own system, whether of polity or of mere law. The long interruption of all intercourse with the continent during the late war had greatly increased these narrow and absurd prejudices, which are now somewhat more nearly brought back to their ancient level. But still the precise dictates of English statutes, and the dicta of English judges and English text-writers, are with them the standard of justice; and in their vocabulary, English law is as much a synonyme for the perfection of wisdom as, in that of Dean Swift's imaginary kingdom, Houynhm was for the " perfection of nature."

Of lawyers who belong to this class, by far the most numerous in the profession, it is also a great mistake to suppose that the talents are confined to mere legal matters, the discussion of dry points, and the conduct of suits according to technical rules. Many of them are subtle and most able arguers; some even powerful reasoners. As admirable a display of logical acumen, in long and sustained chains of pure ratiocination, is frequently exhibited among their ranks as can be seen in the cultivators of any department of rhetoric, or the

students of any branch of science. They often make high pretensions to eloquence, and, without attaining its first rank, are frequently distinguished for great powers of speech, as well as extraordinary skill in the management of business. Their legal reputation, however, is the chief object of their care; and in their pursuit of oratory, they aim far more at being eloquent lawyers than orators learned in the law. Hence their estimate of professional merit is all formed on the same principle, and graduated by one scale. They undervalue the accomplishments of the rhetorician, without despising them; and they are extremely suspicious of any enlarged or general views upon so serious a subject as the law. Change, they with difficulty can bring their minds to believe possible; at least any change for the better: and speculation or theory on such matters is so much an object of distrust, or rather of mingled contempt and aversion, that when they would describe anything ridiculous, or even anomalous in the profession, they cannot go beyond what they call "a speculative lawyer." To expect success in such a one's career was formerly thought absurd. But the great triumph of Sir Samuel Romilly was a sore stumbling-block to technical minds. A free-thinker upon legal matters, if ever any existed; accomplished, learned, eloquent, philosophical; he yet rose to the very head of his profession, and compelled them to believe what Erskine had failed to make them admit that a man may be minutely learned in all the mere niceties of the law, down to the very meanest details of court practice, and yet be able to soar above the higher levels of general speculation, and to charm by his eloquence, and enlighten by his enlarged wisdom, as much as to rule the Bench and head the Bar by his merely technical superiority.

The professional character of the men whom we are discussing is generally pure and lofty; the order to