LORD LOUGHBOROUGH.

MR.WEDDERBURN, afterwards Lord Loughborough and Earl of Rosslyn, was one of the few eminent lawyers who have shone at the least as much in political affairs as in Westminster Hall. Of those English barristers to whom this remark is applicable Mr. Perceval was perhaps the most considerable; of men bred at the Scotch bar, and who were promoted in England, Lord Melville: Mr. Wedderburn, in some sort, partook of both kinds, having been originally an advocate in Edinburgh, where he distinguished himself by his eloquence and by the fierceness of his invective, which, being directed against a leading member of the bar, ended in a quarrel with the court, led to his removing from the provincial theatre, and ultimately raised him to the English bench. He was a person of great powers, cultivated with much care, and chiefly directed towards public speaking. Far from being a profound lawyer, he was versed in as much professional learning on ordinary subjects as sufficed for the common occasions of Nisi Prius. On peerage law, he is believed to have had more know

ledge, and the whole subject lies within a very narrow compass. He affected great acquaintance with constitutional learning; but on this doubts were entertained, augmented, certainly, by the unscrupulous manner in which his opinions were at the service of the political parties he successively belonged to. But his strength lay in dealing with facts; and here all his contemporaries represent his powers to have been unrivalled. It was probably this genius for narrative, for arguing upon probabilities, for marshalling and for sifting evidence, that shone so brilliantly in his great speech at the bar of the House of Lords upon the celebrated Douglas cause, and which no less a judge than Mr. Fox pronounced to be the very finest he ever heard on any subject. It must, however, be remarked, in abatement of this high panegyric, that the faculty of statement and of reasoning without the excitement of a contentious debate, being very little possessed by that great man himself, a happy display of it, not so unusual in professional men, might produce a greater impression upon him than was proportioned to its true value and real weight. That it was a prodigious exhibition may nevertheless be admitted to the united testimony of all who recollect it, and who have lived in our own times. That Lord Loughborough never forgot the Douglas cause itself, as he was said to have forgotten so many merely legal arguments in which he, from

time to time, had been engaged, appears from one of his judgments in Chancery, where he imported into a case before him facts not belonging to it, but recollected by him as having been proved in the case of Douglas.

His manner in earlier life was remarked as excellent; and though it probably partook even then of that over-precision which, in his later years, sometimes bordered upon the ridiculous, it must certainly have been above the common order of forensic delivery to earn the reputation which has remained of it. That he made it an object of his especial care is certain. He is supposed to have studied under a player; and he certainly spared no pains to eradicate his northern accent, beside being exceedingly careful to avoid provincial solecisms. His efforts were eminently successful in both these particulars; but the force of second nature, habit, will yield to that of Nature herself, who is apt to overcome in the end all violence that cultivation may do her. His Scotticisms and his vernacular tones returned as his vigour was impaired in the decline of life; showing that it was all the while an effort which could not continue when the attention was relaxed and its powers enfeebled.

Upon the removal of Sir Fletcher Norton he joined the Northern Circuit, having then the rank of King's Counsel. As this was contrary to all the rules of the profession, and was, indeed, deemed

to be a discreditable proceeding as well as a breach of discipline, even independent of other peculiarities attending the operation,* an immediate resolution was adopted by the Bar to refuse holding briefs with the new-comer; a resolution quite fatal to him, had not Mr. Wallace, a man of undoubted learning and ability, been tempted to break it, and thereby at once to benefit himself and nearly destroy the combination. He thus secured, beside the immediate advantage of professional advancement, the patronage of his leader, who in a few years became Solicitor-General, and afterwards Attorney, under Lord North's administration, drawing Mr. Wallace upwards in his train. He practised in the Court of Chancery; but in those days the line had not been drawn which now, so hurtfully for the Equity practitioner, separates the two sides of Westminster Hall; and Chancery leaders frequented the different circuits almost equally with practitioners in the courts of Common Law.

When he entered the House of Commons he became, in a very short time, one of the two main supports of its ministerial leader; the other was Lord Thurlow and while they remained there to defend him Lord North might well, as Gibbon has described the "Palinurus of the state," indulge in slumbers, with his Attorney and Solicitor General

* He came there with the same clerk whom Sir F. Norton had before in his service.

on either hand remaining at their posts to watch out the long debate. No minister before or since the time of Mr. Addington ever depended so much upon the services of his professional supporters. Indeed, they and Mr. Dundas, alone, appear to have shared with him the whole weight of an attack conducted by the powers of an opposition which Burke and Fox led, and aggravated by the uninterrupted series of disasters which, during the whole American contest, attended the councils of the King and his servants.

Of the debates in those days such scanty remains are preserved, that no one could discover from them the qualities, or even the classes, of the orators who bore a part in them. The critic cannot from such fragments divine the species and supply the lost parts, as the comparative anatomist can by the inspection of a few bones in the fossil strata of the globe. Until, therefore, Lord Loughborough came to the House of Lords, indeed until the Regency question occupied that assembly in 1788 and 1789, we were left without the means of assigning his place as a debater. Of his forensic powers we have better opportunities to judge. Several of his arguments are preserved, particularly in the Duchess of Kingston's case and in one or two causes of celebrity heard before him in the Common Pleas, from which we can form an idea, and it is a very exalted one, of his clearness and neat