Notwithstanding his irregularities, there can be no doubt that he derived great benefit from his residence there. He had occasional fits of severe application; and, always having a contempt for frivolity, when he seemed to be idle he was enlarging his stock of knowledge and sharpening his intellect by conversing with men of strong sense and solid acquirements. Among the strange vicissitudes of life, it did so happen that the refractory disciple, thus discarded from the bosom of Alma Mater, reached the highest civil dignity in the state; and it is pleasant to relate, that, when presiding on the woolsack, he recollected the friendly interference of Dr. Smith, and caused him to be appointed chancellor of the diocese of Lincoln. It is even said, that he afterwards handsomely made atonement to "Mr. Dean." The story goes, that he had had an earlier quarrel with this functionary, who had interrupted him, rather sharply, with the question, "Pray, sir, do you know to whom you are speaking?" bidding him to recollect that he was in the presence of no less a person than the DEAN OF THE COLLEGE. This hint was not lost upon Thurlow, who then, and ever after, began and interlarded every sentence he addressed to him with the vocative "MR. DEAN;" this banter being doubly galling to the assertor of the title, as he could not consistently appear to be offended by it. When the flippant youth, who had been so nearly expelled from his college, had a little while held the Great Seal, the individual who had proposed and pressed his expulsion obeying a summons to wait upon him, the Chancellor's first salutation to him was Dean, how d'ye do? I am very happy to see you Mr. Dean." "My Lord," he observed, somewhat sullenly, "I am no longer Mr. Dean." "That is as you please; and it shall not be my fault if the title does not still belong to you, for I have a deanery at my disposal, which is very much at your service, Mr. Dean.”* "Mr. This generosity was very honourable to Thurlow, for (as he well knew) authority, it became necessary to send him away. I have searched our records, and can find no recorded charge against him, or any sentence passed upon him; so I conclude his friends were advised to take him from College. He was admitted Oct. 5, 1748, and elected a scholar on Dr. Perse's foundation Oct. 12, 1748; this he held till Lady-day, 1751, when his last stipend was paid him. conclude, therefore, that his name was taken off our books about that time, as it does not appear in our list of scholars at Mich. 1751." I A learned friend of mine, now in a judicial station, writes to me-" When I visited Brighton in my first Cambridge vacation, Thurlow asked me of what College I was. 'Of Caius,' I replied, and I keep in the same rooms in which your Lordship is said to have kept.' 'I hope you will keep them,' was the reply. I did not then know how the ex-Chancellor had lost them." * This anecdote, which has often appeared in print, is probably considerably embellished; but so much I know, from undoubted private authority,-that the Dean's name was Goodrich; that he accepted a college living in Dorsetshire; that at the first visitation of the Bishop of Salisbury after Thurlow was Chancellor, Mr. Goodrich said to the Bishop, "I am sure I shall have some preferment from him, as I was the only fellow who dared to punish him ;" and that, the Bishop having mentioned this to the Chancellor, the old Caius man exclaimed, "It is true! he is right, and a living he shall have !” on his being made Chancellor his College met to deliberate whether they should not congratulate him (according to custom) on his elevation,when Dr. Smith, the Master, objected, saying "that it would be an insult, under the circumstances attending his Lordship's removal from College," -and the proposal fell to the ground. His early destination for the bar remaining unaltered, he had been entered of the Inner Temple while an under-graduate at Cambridge ;* and as soon as he quitted the University he took chambers, and began to keep terms by eating a certain number of dinners in the hall—this, since the disuse of "moots" and "readings," being the only curriculum of legal education in England. The voluntary discipline of a special pleader's office was not yet established, although TOM WARREN, the great founder of the special pleading race, to whom I can trace up my pedigree, was then beginning to flourish. The usual custom was, to place the aspirant for the bar as a pupil in the office of a solicitor, where he was supposed to learn how actions were commenced and conducted, with the practice of the different courts of law and equity. For young Thurlow was selected the office of Mr. Chapman, a very eminent solicitor, who carried on business in Lincoln's Inn. Here he met, as a brother pupil, the celebrated William Cowper, author of "The Task." The poet contracted a great friendship for him, and introduced him to his cousin, Lady Hesketh, who lived in Southampton Row, then a fashionable quarter of the town. This gay house was much more agreeable to the taste of the brother-pupils than the smoky chambers of the attorney, smelling of musty parchment; and here they frivolously passed a great part of their time. Cowper, in a private letter written *He is thus described: "Edwardus Thurlow, generosus, filius et hæres apparens Tome Thurlow, de Stratton St. Mary, in comitatu Norfolk, Clerici." I delight to think that my special pleading father, now turned of eighty, is still alive, and in the full enjoyment of his faculties. He lived to see four sons sitting together in the House of Lords— Lord Lyndhurst, Lord Denman, Lord Cottenham, and Lord Campbell. To the unspeakable advantage of having been three years his pupil, I chiefly ascribe my success at the bar. I have great pride in recording that when, at the end of my first year, he discovered that it would not be quite convenient for me to give him a second fee of one hundred guineas, he not only refused to take a second, but insisted on returning me the first. Of all the lawyers, I have ever known, he has the finest analytical head; and if he had devoted himself to science, I am sure that he would have earned great fame as a discoverer. His disposition and his manners have made him universally beloved.-A. D. 1847. many years after, gives this account of their studies:-"I did actually live three years with Mr. Chapman, that is to say, I slept three years in his house; but I lived, that is to say, I spent my days, in Southampton Row, as you very well remember. There was I and the future Lord Chancellor constantly employed, from morning till night, in giggling, and making others giggle, instead of studying the law." Thurlow, while denominated "a student of law," affected the character of an idler. He was fond of society; without being addicted to habitual intemperance, he occasionally indulged in deep potations; and, although his manners were somewhat rough and bearish, as he had great powers of entertainment, his company was much courted by the loungers of the Inns of Court. Thus a good deal of his time was stolen from study, and he could not lay in such stores of learning as Selden and Hale, in the preceding century,—who, for years together, read sixteen hours a day. But he by no means neglected preparation for his profession to the extreme degree which he pretended. He had an admirable head for the law, with a quick perception and a retentive memory; so that he made greater progress than some plodders who were at work all day long and a great part of every night. He attended the remarkable trials and arguments which came on in Westminster Hall, and picked up a good deal of legal knowledge while he seemed only to be abusing the counsel and laughing at the judges. He would still shut himself up for whole mornings, barring his outer door,-when he not only would seize upon a classic, and get up the literature of the day, but make a serious attack on Littleton and Plowden. He did go almost every evening to Nando's coffee-house, near Temple Bar, and swaggered and talked loud there about politics and scandal, new plays and favourite actresses; but--if he had not taken too much of the punch which Mrs. Humphrie's, the landlady, was celebrated for compounding, and her fair daughter served-on returning to his chambers he would read diligently, before going to rest, till his candles turned dim in the morning light. His contemporary, Crad- [A. D. 1752-1754.] dock, who was admitted to his entire intimacy, and from whom he concealed nothing, writes, "It was generally supposed that Thurlow in early life was idle; but I always found him close at study in a morning, when I have called at the Temple; and he frequently went no further in an evening than to Nando's, and then only in his déshabillé." It is or "" * This affectation, which I believe has gone out of fashion like "hair powder" and "shorts," survived to my time. I knew an exceedingly clever young man, who, having taken a high degree at Cambridge, in reality studied the law very assiduously, but who pretended to be idle, or to read only books of amusement. Reversing the practice of the hero of the PLEADER'S GUIDE,-who, if "Hawke" Buzzard," or any attorney, was approaching, conveyed the object of his affections into the coal-hole, and pretended to be reading the "Doctrina placitandi,"-my friend, who was in the habit of poring over "Coke upon Littleton," had a contrivance by which, on a knock coming to the door, this black-letter tome disappeared, and there was substituted for it a novel, the name of which I need not mention." If he had lived, he would have conquered all such follies; but he was destined to an early grave. † Craddock's Memoirs, vol. i. 79. I presume the déshabillé meant that he quite clear, from his successful combats with the members of the "Literary Club," and with the first lawyers in Westminster Hall, that he had effectually, though irregularly, devoted himself to literature and law. Let me, then, anxiously caution the student against being misled by the delusive hope which the supposed idleness of Thurlow has engendered, that a man may become a great lawyer, and rise with credit to the highest offices, without application. Thurlow never would have been Chancellor if he had not studied his profession; and he would have been a much greater Chancellor, and would have left a much higher name to posterity, if he had studied it more steadily. On the 22d of November, 1754, the benchers of his Society, who were supposed to direct his studies, and to examine into his proficiency, having ascertained that he had kept twelve terms by eating the requisite number of dinners in the Hall each term,-called him to the bar, vouching his sufficiency to advocate the causes of his fellow citizens in all courts, civil and criminal. He took his seat in the back rows of the Court of King's Bench, of which Sir Dudley Ryder was then Chief Justice, and he went the Western Circuit, of which Henley and Pratt were the leaders. But for several years he met with little success either in to assist him; his reputation for idleness repelled business [A. D. 1754.] town or country. He had no family interest or connexion from his chambers, and he was too proud to hug the attorneys or to try to get forward by unworthy means. When he had been a few years at the bar, he fell into pecuniary straits. His father had expected that fees would immediately flow in upon him, and proposed to withdraw, instead of increasing, the very moderate allowance which was his sole support. It is even said that the future Chancellor, although he practised a laudable economy, was actually reduced to the following stratagem to procure a horse to carry him round the circuit: He went to a horse-dealer, and said to him that he wished to purchase a good roadster-price being no object to him-but that he must have a fair trial of the animal's paces before he concluded the bargain. The trial being conceded, he rode off to Winchester, and having been well carried all the way round, but still without any professional luck, he returned the horse to his owner, saying that "the animal, notwithstanding some good points, did not altogether suit him." At last fortune smiled upon him. By some chance he had a brief in the case of Luke Robinson v. the Earl of Winchelsea, tried before Lord entered the coffee-house without wearing a cut velvet suit and a sword, as lawyers still did when they entered into fine company. Having reached extreme old age, he told his youngest nephew (from whom I received the statement) that "when young he read much at night; and that once, while at college, having been unable to complete a particular line in a Latin poem he was composing, it rested so on his mind that he dreamed of it, completed it in his sleep, wrote it out next morning, and received many compliments on its classical and felicitous turn."-This may remind the reader of the monk, who, being appointed to write the epitaph of Bede, and being much puzzled for an epithet, fell asleep, and in his dream was supplied by an angel with the following line : "Hacce jacent fossâ BEDE venerabilis ossa." Mansfield, at Guildhall. The leader on the opposite side was Sir Fletcher Norton, then the tyrant of the bar, who began by treating the unknown junior with his usual arrogance. This Thurlow resented with great spirit. They got into an altercation, in which Thurlow had with him the sympathies of the bar and the by-standers, and, with a happy mixture of argument and sarcasm, he completely put down his antagonist. The attorneys who had smarted much under Norton's despotic rule were exceedingly delighted, and resolved to patronise the man who had shown so much courage and capacity.* Briefs in cases of a peculiar character did come in, and he was now known and talked of in the profession as one supposed to be possessed of great resources, and likely one day to make a figure; but still he had few constant clients, and little regular busi- [A. D. 1760.] ness. He had not credit for possessing much technical knowledge of the law, and he did not always exhibit that subordination which the leader expects in a junior counsel, and which indeed the interest of the client demands. In short, he disdained to "play second fiddle" to those whom he conceived inferior performers. There was no chance of his getting forward in the routine progress of professional advancement, and his friends were still under much apprehension of his ultimate failure. It has often been said that he made his fortune by his great speech at the bar of the House of Lords in the Douglas cause. But this story is utterly demolished by the slightest attention to dates. The hearing of that celebrated appeal, in which he certainly gave the finest display of his forensic powers, did not come on till January, 1769; and before then he had long had a silk gown, he led his circuit, he was engaged in every important case which came on in Westminster Hall, and he had been returned to the House of Commons as member for Tamworth. However, his retainer as one of the counsel for the appellant in the Douglas cause truly had a very material and very favourable influence upon his destiny. The occurrence is said to have happened by the purest accident. According to legal tradition, soon after the decision of the Court of Session in Scotland that the alleged son of Lady Jane Douglas was a supposititious child purchased at Paris, the question, which excited great interest all over Europe, was discussed one evening at Nando's coffeehouse-from its excellent punch, and the ministrations of a younger daughter of the landlady, still Thurlow's favourite haunt. At this time, and indeed when I myself first began the study of the law, the modern club system was unknown; and (as in the time of Swift and Addison) * I was myself present when, under very similar circumstances, Topping at once pushed himself into great business at Guildhall, by putting down Gibbs, then Attorney General-quoting the indignant description by Cassius of the tyranny of Cæsar: "Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world, Like a Colossus; and we petty men Walk under his huge legs and peep about The fault is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings." |