863

SIR SAMUEL ROMILLY.

How different from Mr. Pitt's conduct was that of Lord Grenville, who no sooner acceded to office in 1806, than he encouraged all the measures which first restrained, and then entirely abolished that infernal traffic! The crown lawyers of his administration were directed to bring in a bill for abolishing the foreign. slave-trade of our colonies, as well as all importation. into the conquered settlements-and when it is recollected that Sir Samuel Romilly at that time added lustre and gave elevation to the office of solicitorgeneral, it may well be supposed that those duties were duly and cheerfully followed both by him and by his honest, learned, and experienced colleague, Sir Arthur Pigott. It is fit that no occasion on which Sir Samuel Romilly is named should ever be passed over without an attempt to record the virtues and endowments of so great and so good a man, for the instruction of after ages.

Few persons have ever attained celebrity of name and exalted station, in any country, or in any age, with such unsullied purity of character, as this equally eminent and excellent person. His virtue was stern and inflexible, adjusted, indeed, rather to the rigorous standard of ancient morality than to the less ambitious and less elevated maxims of the modern code. But in this he very widely differed from the antique model upon which his character generally appeared to be framed, and also very far surpassed it, that there was nothing either affected or repulsive about him; and if ever a man existed who would more than any other

have scorned the pitiful fopperies which disfigured the worth of Cato, or have shrunk from the harsher virtue of Brutus, Romilly was that man. He was, in truth, a person of the most natural and simple manners, and one in whom the kindliest charities and warmest feelings of human nature were blended in the largest measure with that firmness of purpose and unrelaxed sincerity of principle, in almost all other men found to be little compatible with the attributes of a gentle nature and the feelings of a tender heart.

But

The observer who gazes upon his character is naturally struck first of all with its most prominent feature, and that is the rare excellence which we have now marked, so far above every gift of the understanding, and which throws the lustre of mere genius into the shade. his capacity was of the highest order. An extraordinary reach of thought; great powers of attention and of close reasoning; a memory quick and retentive; a fancy eminently brilliant, but kept in perfect discipline by his judgment and his taste, which was nice, cultivated, and severe, without any of the squeamishness so fatal to vigour; these were the qualities which, under the guidance of the most persevering industry, and with the stimulus of a lofty ambition, rendered him unquestionably the first advocate, and the most profound lawyer, of the age he flourished in; placed him high among the ornaments of the Senate; and would, in all likelihood, have given him the foremost place among them all, had not the occupations of his laborious profession necessarily engrossed a disproportionate share of his attention, and made political pursuits fill a subordinate place in the scheme of his life. Jurisperitorum disertissimus, disertorum vero jurisperitissimus. As his practice, so his authority at the bar and with the bench was unexampled; and his success in Parliament was great and progressive. Some of his speeches, both forensic and Parliamentary, are nearly unrivalled in excellence. The reply, even as reported in 11 Vesey,

junior, in the cause of Hugonin v. Beasley,* where legal matters chiefly were in question, may give no mean idea of his extraordinary powers. The last speech that he pronounced in the House of Commons, upon a bill respecting the law of naturalization, which gave him occasion to paint the misconduct of the expiring Parliament in severe and even dark colours, was generally regarded as unexampled among the efforts of his eloquence; nor can they who recollect its effects ever cease to lament with tenfold bitterness of sorrow, the catastrophe which terminated his life and extinguished his glory, when they reflect that the vast accession to his influence from being chosen for Westminster, came at a time when his genius had reached its amplest display, and his authority in Parliament, unaided by station, had attained the highest eminence. The friend of public virtue, and the advocate of human improvement, will mourn still more sorrowfully over his urn than the admirers of genius, or those who are dazzled by political triumphs. For no one could know Romilly, and doubt that, as he only valued his own success and his own powers, in the belief that they might conduce to the good of mankind, so each augmentation of his authority, each step of his progress, must have been attended with some triumph in the cause of humanity and justice. True, he would at length, in the course of nature, have ceased to live; but then the bigot would have ceased to persecute the despot to vex-the desolate poor to suffer the slave to groan and tremble-the ignorant to commit crimes-and the ill-contrived law to engender criminality.

On these things all men are agreed; but if a more distinct account be desired of his eloquence, it must be said that it united all the more severe graces of

* A case very near resembling this, Macabe v. Hussey, was argued in the House of Lords in October, 1831, by Mr. O'Connell, and his argument was a masterpiece, according to the judgment of those who heard it.

oratory, both as regards the manner and the substance No man argued more closely when the understanding was to be addressed; no man declaimed more powerfully when indignation was to be aroused or the feelings moved. His language was choice and pure; his powers of invective resembled rather the grave authority with which the judge puts down a contempt, or punishes an offender, than the attack of an advocate against his adversary and his equal. His imagination was the minister whose services were rarely required, and whose mastery was never for an instant admitted. His sarcasm was tremendous, nor always very sparingly employed. His manner was perfect, in voice, in figure, in a countenance of singular beauty and dignity; nor was anything in his oratory more striking or more effective than the heartfelt sincerity which it throughout displayed, in topic, in diction, in tone, in look, in gesture. "In Scauri oratione sapientis hominis et recti, gravitas summa, et naturalis quædam inerat auctoritas, non ut causam, sed ut testimonium dicere putares. Significabat enim non prudentiam solum, sed, quod maxime rem continebat, fidem."*

Considering his exalted station at the bar, his pure and unsullied character, and the large space which he filled in the eye of the country, men naturally looked for his ascent to the highest station in the profession of which he was, during so many years, the ornament and the pride. Nor could any one question that he would have presented to the world the figure of a consummate judge. He alone felt any doubt upon the extent of his own judicial qualities; and he has recorded in his journal (that invaluable document in which he was wont to set down freely his sentiments on men and things) a modest opinion, expressing his apprehension, should he ever be so tried, that men would say of him "Capax imperii nisi imperasset."

* Cic., Brutus.

With this single exception, offering so rare an instance of impartial self-judgment, and tending of itself to its own refutation, all who had no interest in the elevation of others, have held his exclusion from the supreme place in the law, as one of the heaviest items in the price paid for the factious structure of our practical govern

ment.

In his private life and personal habits he exhibited a model for imitation, and an object of unqualified esteem. All his severity was reserved for the forum and the senate, when vice was to be lashed, or justice vindicated, the public delinquent exposed, or the national oppressor overawed. In his family and in society, where it was his delight, and the only reward of his unremitting labours, to unbend, he was amiable, simple, natural, cheerful. The vast resources of his memory, the astonishing economy of time, by which he was enabled to read almost every work of interest that came from the press of either his hereditary or his native country, either France or England, the perfect correctness of his taste, refined to such a pitch that his pencil was one of no ordinary power, and his verses, when once or twice only he wrote poetry, were of great merit, his freedom from affectation,-the wisdom of not being above doing ordinary things in the ordinary way,-all conspired to render his society peculiarly attractive, and would have made it courted even had his eminence in higher matters been far less conspicuous. While it was the saying of one political adversary, the most experienced and correct observer* among all the parliamentary men of his time, that he never was out of his place while Romilly spoke, without finding that he had cause to lament his absence,— it was the confession of all who were adınitted to his private society, that they forgot the lawyer, the orator, and the patriot, and had never been aware, while

Mr. Charles Long, afterwards Lord Farnborough.