Can gratitude outpant the silent breath, Or a friend's sorrows pierce the gloom of death? "To a Lady, with a Present of Pope's Works. For thee, by virtue and the muse adorn'd." "Stanzas in the Manner of Waller, occasioned by a Receipt to make Ink given to the Author by a Lady. "In earliest times ere man had learn'd His sense in writing to impart, With inward anguish oft he burn'd, His friend unconscious of the smart. "Alone he pin'd in thickest shade, Near murmuring waters sooth'd his grief, "Cadmus, 'tis said, did first reveal How letters should the mind impress, "Soon was the feeble waxen trace Supplied by ink's unfading spot, The world to know so great a good; The hero's valour, statesman's art, The maiden's eyes, the lover's heart. "This kindly spares the modest tongue Fond vows the virgin paper stain."* See also "Ode to the Honourable Miss Yorke, on her copying a portrait of Dante;" Cooksey's Life of Lord Hardwicke, 35; Annual Register, 1770. Charles Yorke was a member of the Royal Society, but, though distinguished in literature, I do not believe that he ever showed any taste for science. He always continued to delight in the society of men of letters and was desirous of serving them. Hurd was indebted to him for promotion, as well as Warburton. He did not waste his time in field sports and frivolous amusements. All the leisure he could spare from professional and political occupations he allotted to intellectual pursuits and enjoyments. I find only one jest of his recorded, and it does not make us regret that he did not oftner aim at humour. After being returned member for the University, he went round to pay his respects to the members of the senate. Among them was an old "fellow" proverbial for having the largest and most hideous face that ever was seen. Mr. Yorke thus addressed him :-"Sir, I have great reason to be thankful to my friends in general, but confess myself under particular obligation to you for the very remarkable countenance you have shown me on this occasion." Although Henry Fox spitefully says, "Yorke was very ugly while he lived," according to his portraits, the likeness of him on his tomb, and a figure of him in wax, still preserved, his countenance was intellectual and pleasing. Though his features were plain, his smile is said to have been soft and captivating; and his eye and mouth, in particular, indicated to a physiognomist his high mental qualities. He must have had much goodness of heart, for a numerous body of friends were very warmly attached to him. His untimely end caused a tremendous sensation in the metropolis, and political opponents joined in deeply deploring it. George Hardinge says," I saw Lord Camden just after Mr. Yorke's death, and I never in my life observed him so melancholy as that event made him. All their competitions and jealousies were at an end, and he lamented him in tears, and spoke of him with undissembled esteem."* I should have mentioned that his remains were interred in the parish church at Wimple, where there is erected a splendid monument to him by Schremaker, bearing an inscription, which, after stating his birth and earlier promotions, thus proceeds : "The Great Seal was delivered to him, January 17th, 1770, at a juncture very unfavourable for his accepting it. He died, after a short illness, on the 20th of that month. He possessed uncommon Endowments, natural and acquired; was a complete Master of his own Profession, as practised in both parts of the United Kingdom; had an extensive knowledge of Polite Literature, and understood with accuracy the Modern as well as Ancient Languages. His Style in Composition and Speaking was nervous, elegant, and clear, and his Invention and Learning often furnished him with arguments which had escaped the Ingenuity of others. He was heard with attention and conviction, both in the Senate and at the Bar. His Mind was of a humane and liberal turn; and both in his public and private Station, he always acted upon Principles of Virtue and Honour. With these Talents and Qualities, we justly lament that the Public was deprived of his Abilities at a juncture when they might have been of the greatest use, and the Crown of his Service in a Station to which he had been long destined, and which he would have eminently adorned." *MS. Life of Lord Camden. "This Monument is erected to his Memory by his most affectionate and afflicted Brother, PHILIP Earl of HARDWICKE." Considering that these are the sentiments of one who had so loved him from infancy, and so deeply lamented the close of his career, they are most solemn and affecting. Charles Yorke, from his life and from his death, will always be interesting in English history. “His moral and intellectual worth, literary merits, legal renown, and, more than all these, his gentle goodness and attaching qualities of heart, shed a calm and placid light, even at this interval of time, over his memory, like the pure ray of some distant star, which the mists, raised by earth, have for a time obscured from our view."* The Great Seal not having been put to the patent for creating him Baron Morden before he expired, this peerage only reminds his descendants of the additional honours they might have acquired. His eldest son, soon after coming of age, represented the county of Cambridge in parliament, till the death of his uncle, the second Earl of Hardwicke, in 1790, when he succeeded to all the honours and estates of the family. On his death without male issue in 1834, they devolved on the present Earl of Hardwicke, whose father, the late gallant and good-humoured Vice-Admiral Sir Joseph Yorke, M.P., was the youngest son by the second marriage of Lord Chanceller Charles Yorke.† * Law Mag. No. lxi. 95. † Ante, p. 159.; Grandeur of the Law, 66. There is a laboured panegyric on the subject of this memoir, which, coming from a very eminent lawyer who had frequently heard him plead at the bar, possesses sufficient interest to justify me in copying it in a note, although it be written in a turgid and almost_bombastic style:- That modern constellation of English jurisprudence, that elegant and accomplished ornament of Westminster Hall in the present century (1792), the Honourable Charles Yorke, Esq.; whose ordinary speeches as an advocate were profound lectures; whose digressions, from the exuberance of the best juridical knowledge, were illuminations; whose energies were oracles; whose constancy of mind was won into the pinnacle of our English forum at an inauspicious moment; whose exquisiteness of sensibility at almost the next moment from the impressions of imputed error stormed the fort even of his cultivated reason, and so made elevation and extinction contemporaneous! and whose permatureness of fate, notwithstanding the great contributions from the manly energies of a Northington and the vast splendour of a Camden, and notwithstanding also the accessions from the two rival luminaries which have more latterly adorned our equitable hemisphere [Thurlow and Wedderburn], cause an almost insuppliable interstice in the science of English equity. To have been selected as the friend of such a man was nearly instar omnium to an English lawyer. Even to be old enough to have received the impressions of Mr. Charles Yorke's character as a lawyer from the frequency of hearing his chaste, delicate, and erudite expressions in the discharge of professional duty, is some source of mental gratification.”HARGRAVE'S Preface to Hale, p. clxxxi. This effort of an industrious black-letter conveyencer at fine writing was thus justly satirised in "The Pursuits of Literature :" "With HARGRAVE to the Peers approach with awe, There is a disparaging character of Charles Yorke by Horace Walpole, to which, from the author's prejudices against all the Yorkes, little weight can be CHAPTER CLII. LIFE OF LORD CHANCELLOR BATHURST FROM HIS BIRTH TILL HE WAS MADE A PUISNE JUDGE. COMPENSATION is sometimes made for a scanty share of natural abilities by great success in the world. Thus, justice is done to the individual, while the pride of rewarded genius is tempered, and a balm is applied to the wounded self-complacency of those who have been unfortunate. For such wise purposes, Henry Bathurst-little qualified for any intellectual pursuit-became a Member of the House of Commons, one of the twelve Judges, a Commissioner of the Great Seal, Lord Chancellor, Lord President of the Council, and an Earl,—and when he had been raised to the first magistracy in the kingdom, he retained that situation for a much longer period than More, Bacon, Clarendon, or Somers. To his credit be it remembered, that he reached such a height without a dishonourable action. The portion of plain common sense bestowed upon him was unmixed with any vicious propensity; and his career, if it was without brilliancy, was without reproach. The proximate causes of his success may be considered harmless manners, sober habits, family interest, and the mediocrity of his parts, which, preventing envy and jealousy, made him to be regarded with favour by men in power, and to be preferred to others who might have given trouble by entertaining an independent opinion, and who might from dependants have risen into rivals. It should likewise be borne in mind that, as far as the public could observe, he performed almost decently the duties of the offices in which to the surprise of mankind he was placed, affording a memorable example of what may be accomplished by dull discretion.* given:-"Yorke's speeches in parliament had for some time, though not so soon as they ought, fallen into disesteem. At the bar his practice had declined, from a habit of gluttony and intemperance, as I have mentioned. Yet as a lawyer his opinion had been in so high repute, that he was reported to have received 100,000 guineas in fees. In truth his chief practice had flourished while his father was not only Lord Chancellor, but a very powerful minister. Yorke's parts were by no means shining. His manner was precise, yet diffuse; and his matter more sententious than instructive. His conduct was timid, irresolute, often influenced by his profession, oftener by interest. He sacrificed his character to his ambition of the Great Seal, and his life to his repentance of having attained it."— Mem. Geo. III., iv. 53. "Have you not observed," writes Swift to Bolingbroke, "that there is a lower kind of discretion and regularity, which seldom fails of raising men to the highest stations in the court, the church, and the law? Did you never observe one of your clerks cutting his paper with a blunt ivory knife? Did you ever know the knife to fail going the true way? Whereas if he had used a razor or a penknife, he had odds against himself of spoiling a whole sheet. I have twenty times compared the notion of that ivory implement to those talents that thrive best at court." The subject of this memoir was the second son of Allen, Lord Bathurst, who acted a distinguished part in public life during four reigns, and is celebrated in prosaic verses by Pope, and in poetical prose by Burke. The family are said to have come from Germany, and to have resided at "Batters," near Luneburg, from which originally they took their name. In coming to England they had a grant of a tract of forest land in Sussex, which was at first called "Batters Hurst," and then "Bathurst." Their castle here was demolished, and they lost almost the whole of their property during the wars of the Roses, so that for some generations they fell into obscurity. But they were revived by commerce; and Sir Benjamin Bathurst, their chief, in the reign of William III., rose to be Governor of the East India Company, and treasurer of the household to Princess Anne of Denmark. Allen, the long-lived,-his son,-having studied a Trinity College, Cambridge, under the then Master, Dean Bathurst, this uncle, was returned to parliament, when hardly of age, for the borough of Cirencester, and became a partisan of the Tories. As a reward for his services, he was raised to the peerage,-being one of the batch of twelve, made in 1711, to support the Peace of Utrecht,-who, when they were introduced into the House of Lords, were asked, in legal phraseology addressed to a jury, "if they would speak by their foreman ?" He continued an active debater in that House above half a century,-almost invariably in opposition to the successive Whig administrations formed under the first two princes of the House of Brunswick. But he lived to see better times, when Tory ascendancy was to be restored. In 1757, he was appointed treasurer to George III., then Prince of Wales; and when that Sovereign came to the throne, although the venerable Tory Peer declined office on account of his infirmities, he had a pension granted to him of 20007. a year, and he was in due time advanced to an Earldom. He was spared to behold his son, well stricken in years, sitting on the woolsack as Lord High Chancellor; being the only individual, except the father of Sir Thomas More, on whom such a felicity was ever conferred. But he was less distinguished as a statesman than as the intimate associate of Swift, Prior, Rowe, Congreve, Arbuthnot, Gay, Addison, and Pope,-still keeping up an intimate acquaintance with the most distinguished of the succeeding generation of men of letters. We have an interesting relation of the manner in which he became acquainted with the author of Tristram Shandy :-"He came up to me one day," says that lively writer, "as I was at the Prince of Wales's court; I want to know you, Mr. Sterne, but it is fit that you should know also who it is that wishes that pleasure. You have heard of an old ' Lord Bathurst, of whom your Popes and Swifts have sung and spoken so much. I have lived my life with geniuses of that cast, but have survived them: and, despairing ever to find their equals, it is some years since I have cleared my accounts and shut up my books, with thought of never opening them again. But you have kindled a desire in me of opening them once more before I die, which now I do; so go home and dine with me.' This nobleman, I say, is a prodigy; for at eighty-five |