made Prest of the Council again.

His opinion of Mr. Pitt.

His wonderful powers at the Board of Privy Council.

His good fortune as to the rights of Juries.

His opinion sanctioned by the Legislature.

At the age of 77 he makes as brilliant a speech as ever he made in his life in support of the bill.

His able statement of the Regency measures.

His decay and last illness.

his change of political sentiments.

- his opinion respecting Dumourier.

Sketch of his domestic life and character."*

"PREFACE.

"Personal gratitude and personal affection to the Good and Great who have closed their scene upon earth, are elevated sentiments. They are debts of honour to the departed spirit.

"But there is a third party in the contract whose claim is imperious upon attachments like these. A public interest is at stake in the example, and calls upon the historian, who had the most familiar access to it, for a living resemblance to the character of the portrait.

"There is a delicacy and pride in esteem when challenged by the eloquent appeal of departed genius and virtue. Nothing is more injurious to its honour than a lavish intemperance of praise.

"But a delight in calling back to the world a favourite character may surely be indulged without prejudice to the discipline of conscience and of religious truth. For what is true fame' (to borrow an image from the most eloquent of men) 'but in the consenting judgment of honest men? It is their answer to virtue, and, like that of an echo to the voice, it is animated by the impression it repeats.'

To this memorial of Earl Camden's life I am impelled by two co-operating motives-by a sense of love to him, and by a demand of the public interest. Aware of my own peril in the effort, I overcome the fear, and sustain it by a reflection that I could not, as an honest man, decline a task imposed by the union of two such claims upon me.

"This favourite of his country and of its proudest honours, conferred upon me good offices of a nature truly parental. He conferred them with all the generous prejudices and vigilant attentions of the duty thus adopted and self-imposed.

"But in course of time his predilections ripened into confidence. He indulged me with his familiar habits.

"Upon most of the leading events in his powerful career through the world, he unveiled himself to me with all that simplicity of character which formed so engaging a part of his nature.

He was a man who hated falsehood, and who had contempt for the miscalculated vanity of self-importance.

"The notices therefore imparted by him to me are so far memorable that in them is to be found the whisper (if it must not be called a soliloquy) of a discerning and most ingenuous mind overheard in the bosom of retirement."

FRAGMENTS OF THE LIFE OF LORD CAMDEN, BY GEORGE HARDINGE. "At an early period he formed an acquaintance and friendly as well as pleasant intercourse, with Mr. Henley, afterwards Earl of Northington, who as I often

It is very gratifying to me to find that my Memoir omits so few of the topics above enumerated, and that George Hardinge, as far as he goes, corroborates my statements.

heard him say, was the most practical and generous friend of his youthful ambition-recommended him upon the circuit when he was at the head of it, and upon one occasion transferred all his briefs to him, either disabled by illness, or called away for some higher demand upon his professional talents. It has been told another way-that all the eminent counsel had been pre-engaged on one side, and that upon a complaint by the adversaries to Mr. Henley, who had the lead, he said, 'Why don't you go to young Pratt?' Who is he?' cried the attorney. What signifies who he is? take him,' said Henley, and see what you can make of him.' I never heard him state the particulars from him, as he had a contempt for such anecdotes; but he has in general told me that he was for a long time very poor, very obscure, and very little employed."

He never derived the least advantage from the distinguished repute of his father. "It was not worth a guinea to me, that I can recollect," were his own words. "From the time he was thoroughly known, his advancement at the bar was rapid. He was counsel in the Chippenham election, which gave a death blow to Sir Robert Walpole as the Minister; and Lord C. often described the political incidents which accompanied that event in a very entertaining manner.

"His opinion was congenial to that of Milton, as an advocate for the unlicensed press; and that Government should see how they demeaned themselves." After referring to the bill to amend the Habeas Corpus Act, introduced in 1758, the author says: "The Attorney General, who had prompted this measure, voted, and spoke as an advocate for its reception, with eloquence and spirit. The bill was rejected in the House of Peers. Proud was the day for Britain which attested the unexampled phenomenon of the Minister and of his Attorney General holding up and spreading their shield over the rights of the subject against even a contingent abuse of the executive power, in opposition to a majority of the Cabinet. I am not aware that, except on this one occasion, he ever spoke in the House of Commons; and I know his opinion to be, that an Attorney General ought rather to be reserved than forward in political debates, unless where great principles of the constitution are implicated."

In giving the history of the passing of the Libel Bill, he says: "I shall never cease to lament that I did not personally hear this parting voice of his gifted and superior mind. But I perfectly remember that, before the bill passed, I was in the House of Peers when Lord Thurlow (no every-day's adversary) asked of him, from the woolsack, to agree to some amendment in the title or preamble of the bill. His answer was, in perfect good-humour, 'No, I thank you, my Lord. You may conquer me, if you can; but I will never capitulate.' Intentum animum tanquam arcum habuit; nec senectuti succubuit.' I remember that when the question was put, Lord Thurlow said, 'I am afraid the Contents have it.'

"One salutary consequence has followed from the bill. Instead of a disgraceful squabble and captious warfare between the Judge and the juries, they have gone hand in hand for the punishment of libellers."

“I have heard Lord Camden say, that he felt himself responsible, in the office of Attorney General, to the public as well as to the Ministers, and that he never prosecuted, or countermanded prosecution, or signed a warrant, if it was not the act of his own advice and judgment, by which he was ready and willing to abide, instead of throwing it off, and shifting it upon the Government; that he interposed himself as a judicial officer between the executive Government and the subject; that he acted as a kind of referee, accountable to both parties, by a tacit compact, for a sound and virtuous exercise of discretion; that he had made this point with Lord Chatham at their first interview; that he commended him for making it, and assured him of support, adding these memorable words; 'You shall not fight single-handed.'

"He refused obedience to the warrant from the Board of Treasury, directing him to countermand farther prosecution. He wrote his ground of refusal. He told them, he was not apprized by the warrant either of their grounds for prosecuting or of the reasons which had induced them to be more lenient; that he could not, therefore, act blindfolded, but that, as it happened, he had a very

accurate knowledge of their ground for prosecuting, because it was impressed upon them by him that the defendant had since been convicted, by two verdicts, of a dangerous fraud on the Government; that he could not therefore, in conscience, give to such a convict the charter of impunity which they had prompted. He took the opportunity of reminding them, with spirit and with dignity, that he was answerable to the public, as well as to his conscience, for the due execution of a judicial trust imposed upon him by his patent. The Board, at first enraged, had the good sense and the manliness, after cool reflection, to confess themselves in the wrong, and to reclaim the letter, so that it should not appear against them."

"When Lord Ferrers was tried, in Westminster Hall, before his peers, for murder, Mr. Pratt's luminous and pertinent manner of stating the material fact, were so distinguished, that I heard many excellent judges of legal eloquence call that work (for it is in print, as he delivered it,) a masterpiece of its kind. His cross-examination upon the topic of insanity was judicious, acute, and impressive. I remember the effect, as it were yesterday, when he said, 'Had the noble prisoner at the bar a power of distinguishing, as a moral agent, between right and wrong, or was he ignorant, in your opinion, that murder was an offence to God as well as man?'

"His talents however, as an advocate, brilliant as they were of their kind, in the Court of Chancery, at the Board of Privy Council, and in appeals to the House of Lords, fell very short of those for which he was reserved upon the Bench, and which he had soon the opportunity of displaying, for the public advantage, in a degree which no time can obliterate."

"He has often told me, that in the Court of Chancery multitudes would flock to hear Lord Hardwicke as to hear Garrick, that his clearness of arrangement and comprehension of the subject were masterly, but that his address (and he laid emphasis upon the word), in the turn which he gave to all, whether he was in the right, or was to make the worse appear the better reason,' was like magic. "I never heard Lord Camden speak of Lord Mansfield in terms of asperity, or without a general praise of his wonderful talents."

"In a few months after the King's death, Lord Bute superseded the Attorney General in that office, and raised him against his will, but it was Hobson's choice, to a vacant seat on the bench as Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. I have heard him say that he paused again and again before he accepted this judicial office, though it was intimated that he was, at all events, to be no longer Attorney General. It was happy for the public, and for him, that he was over-persuaded by his friends to become a judicial man. Lord Bute had no good will to him in this arrangement. He was no friend of the Whigs, or of such an Attorney General. His object was (and it was, apparently, no improvident calculation) to lay him upon the shelf for the remainder of his life. The new Chief Justice marked at once the philosophy and good humour of despair:-'I am a figure,' said he, 'put into that niche in halls, and am never to leave it.' At another time he said, he was an old family picture out of fashion, and carried up stairs by force into the garret. But what are human culculations? The new Chief Justice of the Common Pleas was a short-sighted prophet as well as Lord Bute."

"His judgment upon the ever-memorable case of Mr. Wilkes, in all its numerous branches, evinced consummate ability, a discriminating acuteness of intellect, and that commanding simplicity of character which never deserted him. Being at Cambridge, I could not hear his speech on Wilkes' liberation, and being impatient to read it, one of the Chief Justice's admirers and friends said, 'Your academical conceit will be disappointed. There are no flowers in it. No Tully. No Demosthenes. It is very sound law-but as dry as a bone!'

“He had freedoms in gold boxes, and sat for his picture in Guildhall. It is a whimsical fact that Samuel Johnson, the most avowed and flaming Tory of his age, wrote the Latin inscription, which is at the foot of the picture.

"Among the obloquies of the day, it was broadly asserted that Mr. Pitt and his Chief Justice degraded themselves by adopting Mr. Wilkes; and likewise

that Lord Camden had never seen him in his life till he saw him in his own Court of Common Pleas, and that he had no personal intercourse with him. I know, likewise, that neither he nor Mr. Pitt were the favourites of that incendiary. Upon some occasion Mr. Pitt called him the libeller of the King, and blasphemer of his God—which as being truths very unpolished, he never could forgive. As for Lord Camden, I can vouch for it, and shall not overlook it in the picture of his domestic life-that no man ever breathed who had such an abhorrence of obscenity, or of an improper liberty with sacred names.

"I never saw him administer criminal justice, but I am told that he was remarkably humane, feeling, and compassionate. I remember that he thought Lord Hardwicke's Act, which made forgery capital, too severe, and that he often said, 'no policy could reconcile him to it,'-adding, however, that he was, perhaps, in fault, but that he could not help it.'

"I have known him often uneasy under the impression that he had misconceived a fact or an argument. I observe that, in the Court of Common Pleas, he has more than once confest himself in the wrong. It will be found that in the House of Peers in the debate on the American tax, he alludes to these habits of his judicial conduct in a very modest and graceful manner."

"It may seem unmanly and frivolous to lay stress upon it, but he possessed the manners of a perfect gentleman, both at the bar and upon the bench, in a degree and with an effect that elevated them into ornaments of a superior mind."

"In planatation appeals he gave equal satisfaction, and his memory of the fact, at issue, in so advanced a period of his life, could with difficulty be imagined unless by those who attested the miracle. In causes of a mixed nature from Guernsey and Jersey, his temper, address, and zeal for the good will of those islands to this country, without offence to judicial conclusions, were infinitely meritorious and most critically useful."

"He delivered in the House of Peers all the regulations (in their successive details) of the intended Regency, and stated them with energy of mind unimpaired-though in a single instance he was oppressed by an attack made upon him on a topic in which it was alleged his opinion was unconstitutional, viz. as to the power of creating peers, which he had represented, and with perfect accuracy, to have been vested heretofore in Parliament. Worn out by the conflict, in a fit of low spirits, he confessed the indiscretion, and threw himself upon the mercy of his opponents."

"Lord Shelburne's character is too well known to demand any analysis of it, and I have only to observe that, with all his peculiarities, Lord Camden admired his debating powers above those of any other peer in his time. Lord Chatham alone excepted."

"Lord Camden recommended Mr. Dunning to the office of Solicitor General. From that period, as long as he remained at the bar, he had more business than ever fell to the share of any other individual; and, I am free to confess, more than he should have assumed his power to execute, for to my personal knowledge he often held briefs upon the faith of his attendance, and of his argument, both which he entirely withheld from his client without pleading an excuse for it, and much less returning his fee. The habit was emulated by others, and because an air of those who acquired celebrity at the bar-but no fashion can justify it. If one could ever say in what part of Mr. Dunning's professional merit as an advocate his pre-eminence over others was the most conspicuous, that problem would, perhaps, be solved—at his chambers. I remember a very marked instance of the homage then paid him by no common man, Lord Thurlow, when Attorney General. I had consulted the latter on a subject of law which bore upon my own personal interest. He invited me to dinner, and gave me his opinion at his table; but having given it, he said, 'let us go to Dunning; he will set us right in half a minute.' The remark was prophetic as well as candid and liberal."

"It is not a little singular that Lord Camden's outset in the House of Peers, after he became Chancellor, and his last words before he left the woolsack never to be seated upon it again, were equally unfortunate. In the course of the de

bate, in which he maintained 'that expulsion from the House of Commons did not by the law of Parliament incapacitate the member so expelled at a future election,' Lord Chatham, who had left the administration, represented him with indiscretion at least, if not with indelicacy, as having declared the same opinion privately to him, when he had not in fact given his colleagues in the Cabinet any direct information of it, although all of them perfectly knew it. This exposed him to a very animated, forcible, and popular attack upon him. His friend the Duke of Grafton, was peevish in his reply, and they parted in that House with a semblance of mutual asperity."

"I was present when he took his seat as Chancellor in Lincoln's Inn Hall, and was not a little surprised, but more than a little pleased, at his readiness in deciding off hand upon the variety of motions which he heard upon what is called a Seal Day,' though he had left the Court for some years. It seemed as

if he had been in the daily and recent habit of attention to its rules.

"He found a bar elevated in its character for talents and learning. Mr. Yorke was at the head of it. Mr. De Grey, the new Attorney General, had begun to feel his ground firm as a rock under him, and Lord Rosslyn, then Mr. Wedderburn, gave powerful hints of that brilliant eloquence that was in future to make him so distinguished a figure at the bar and in the House of Commons.

"None have denied that Lord Camden filled the judicial province of this new department so as to unite all the suitors of this Court, and all others, in one opinion concerning him—that superior talents for that seat had never fallen to the share of any man except Lord Hardwicke, who had so wonderfully enlightened the Court by his judicial experience and penetration. Lord Camden's judgment, like that of his model, was uncommonly sound, and his mode of delivering his opinion persuasive: his apprehension quick, and his explanation of the subject luminous. But no Judge, on the other hand, had less conceit of his own undisciplined opinion against the weight of precedents fixed and settled. He likewise avoided the practice of repealing acts of parliament by judicial construction, saying, that he could not be more or less enlightened or liberal than his law-giver had enabled him to be.'-Unfortunately, he seldom wrote his judgments, so that few of them are extant as compositions."

"He took notes more from habit or from diffidence, than from necessity: but he often dispensed with his notes, stating facts with as much accuracy as if he had read what he had written. At the Privy Council, I have known him often go through a cause which had numerous and complicated facts without a note of the arguments delivered by the counsel, and with no written preparation of any kind-with a force and perspicuity almost inconceivable. In the Downing cause he adopted a course I never saw taken by others in my life. Upon some of the topics he read what he had written from his paper for others he depended on memory alone-and leading them into his MS., he took it up again-then left it again-without embarrassment of any kind.

"But I have now to relate what must appear to those who have read that voluminous and complicated romance, the Douglas cause, more an experiment upon credulous minds, than a miracle which evidence can attest. I had an office under him, and I attended him in his coach to the House of Lords. He was then Chancellor. Though I knew him to be anxious, I had never seen him so tremulous and flurried. He was afraid of the demand upon him, which fear he told me had induced him to write, not the whole of his argument, but the heads of it. He had shown them to me in his own hand, fairly written, upon seven or eight pages of folio paper. He said that he was afraid of not using them, and was afraid of using them too; lest, as it was not his habit in such an assembly to look at a paper, it should throw his thoughts into confusion. When he began to address the House, my attention was fixed upon this paper which he had rolled up. Not having at first any other occasion for it, he waived it as a kind of truncheon. From one topic he was led on to another, and through a very long as well as able and impressive argument, he never unfolded that paper, nor was at a loss for a single fact. Lord Mansfield, who followed him, spoke from notes, and consulted them without reserve."