open failure on the judicial bench, even his facile manner of expression could not induce the keen critics who practised before him to believe that he was on a level with many of his predecessors in the law. He was fonder of politics and of the "happier hour of social pleasure," and could not force himself to submit to the drudgery of protracted and patient labor. The defects of his disposition were not unknown to himself. On one occasion, when Lord Loughborough, the object of his hatred and rivalry, was speaking with considerable effect on a question in which Thurlow had a strongly adverse opinion, but had not studied in sufficient detail to be able to interfere, the chancellor, as he writhed with annoyance on the woolsack, was heard to mutter, "If I were not as lazy as a toad at the bottom of a well, I could kick that fellow heels over head any day in the week."

He was driven to rely on the legal abilities of his "devils," the chief of whom were Buller, Kenyon, and Hargrave; and it must be confessed that the old "tiger," or "lion," as his juniors at the bar dubbed him, selected his "providers" with judgment. In the presidency of Buller, as his substitute in the Court of Chancery, he placed more reliance than in any one else. When the difficulties of explanation that surrounded the question of Marie Antoinette's diamond necklace were mentioned in his presence, he asserted that "Buller, Garrow, and a Middlesex jury would have made it, in half an hour, as clear as daylight." Kenyon's industry often made up for his patron's laziness, either in devilling for him as attorney-general, or in sitting for him as lord chancellor; and Kenyon-whom Thurlow, in allusion to his Welsh origin, playfully called by the endearing title of "Taffy"-was duly rewarded for his labors. The post which he coveted was that of chief justice of Chester, but the king's sergeant, Sir Thomas Davenport, "the best-tempered man out of court and the very worsttempered man in court," also contended for it. Davenport, wishing to chime in

with Thurlow's humor, put to him the plain question, "The chief justiceship of Chester is vacant; am I to have it?" The reply was worthy of the questiou: "No, by God; Kenyon shall have it!" As a lawyer Hargrave was more than a match for either of these men, but, unlike them, he did not possess the gift of putting his knowledge to pecuniary advantage. He was poor all his life, never attained to the Bench, and when his mind gave way, in 1813, his wife was obliged to raise money by petitioning Parliament to purchase his books and manuscripts. Fearne, the author of the "Essay on Contingent Remainders," was another of these improvident lawyers, and Thurlow once sent him, in the handsomest manner, the substantial contribution of £100.

Thurlow's pet among the juniors was John Scott, and his bête noire was Pepper Arden, for whom he always expressed the greatest feeling of contempt. When Pitt proposed that Arden should succeed to the office of master of the rolls, the chancellor made long and furious objection, but the premier was inflexible. Thurlow at last gave way with the customary oath, "I care not who the devil you appoint, but he shan't heave his damned wallet on my shoulders." One day a messenger came to the chancellor in open court, with Arden's respects and regret that he was too ill to sit at the Rolls, whereupon Thurlow demanded, in a voice of thunder, "What ails him?" The trembling reply was, "Please, your Lordship, he is laid up with the English cholera." The answer did not mollify the august questioner, who burst out with, "Let him take an act of Parliament and try to digest it; there is nothing so binding."

One day Arden and Scott argued before Thurlow in the same cause. The leader "spoke with great fluency, but very loosely and without due preparation," and when Scott rose to explain his views, the chancellor exclaimed, coram publico, "I am glad, Mr. Scott, to find that you are engaged in this cause, for I now stand some chance to know something of the matter." Even

the pet, however, did not always escape from a stinging sarcasm. He was once greeted with the gibe, "I was with you, Mr. Scott-till I heard your argument." On the recommendation of Sir Grey Cooper, a fellow-Northumbrian, Scott was promised one of those convenient commissionerships in bankruptcy,

worth over £150 a year, but he never received it. Thurlow, when reproached in after-life with this neglect, defended his conduct: "It would have been your ruin. Young men are very apt to be content when they get something to live upon. So when I saw what you were made of, I determined to break my promise, and to make you work."

After his ejectment from the office of lord chancellor, the "tiger" fell into comparative insignificance. He had purchased in 1785 the farm of Brockwell Green, in Streatham, from the Duke of St. Albans and George Beauclerk, his heir apparent, and in 1789, when they were both dead, he acquired from the latter's trustees the adjoining manor of Leigham Court. On a part of this property, known as Knight's Hill, Norwood, he built, from the designs of Henry Holland, the architect of Carlton House and the old Drury Lane Theatre, a stately house, with splendid views over the surrounding country, and with beautiful grounds around it. Needless to say that he quarrelled with the architect, and that he spent a great deal more money than he intended, rumor going so far as to say that house and grounds cost £30,000. Thurlow never inhabited this mansion, but while his health lasted, spent most of his days in a smaller and inconvenient building, Knight's Hill Farm, which adjoined it. He was pestered by inquiries from his friends, who laughingly asked him when he was going to enter into possession of his new house. To a lady of high rank who put the question to him as he was coming out of the queen's drawing-room, he replied, "Madame, the queen has just asked me that important question, and as I would not tell her I will not tell you." The end of this expenditure was the passing in 1809 of a private act, by

which the lord chancellor's trustees could grant building leases, make roads, and-pull down the house!

Once or twice after his retirement he asserted himself in the House of Lords, and once or twice he was again drawn into public affairs. The Prince of Wales proposed in 1793 to bring him back to the Cabinet as president of the Council, but nothing came of the suggestion. It had been said of him by Pitt that "in the Cabinet he opposed everything, proposed nothing, and was ready to support anything," and who was there to wish for such a colleague! Thurlow repaid the prince's proposition by expressing his regret in public that a larger allowance was not granted to the prince on his marriage. When the attorney-general prosecuted some wellknown personages for treason in 1794, and occupied the time of the court with a speech of nine hours in length, the comment of the "tiger" was, "What! speak for nine hours. Then, by God, there is no treason in the case!" At the close of 1797, when the prince's marriage had proved disastrous, he endeavored to bring about an amicable separation of husband and wife, but the attempt was doomed to failure. He continued until the conclusion of the trial of Warren Hastings to act and speak as his friend, and when he had made the personal acquaintance of Horne Tooke, who, though in priest's orders, had been returned to Parliament for Old Sarum by the second Lord Camelford, he vehemently opposed the bill for enacting that no one in a similar condition should be eligible for election in future Parliaments. His last speech in the House of Lords was in the debate on the Treaty of Amiens, 4th May, 1802. A fruitless search after health frequently carried him to Scarborough, Ramsgate, Bath, or Brighton, and several pictures have been painted of him as he appeared in his declining years. The autumn of 1798 was passed in a house at St. Lawrence, near Ramsgate, where he amused himself with the topography of Kent, and resumed the study of Greek. A volume of Aristophanes was spread out before

of Canterbury, by whom he had a son, Charles, who died a student at Cambridge;" but the general belief is that this youth, as well as his three illegitimate daughters, were by another lady with whom he lived for many years. The eldest daughter married Colonel Samuel Browne, of the York Infantry Volunteers, one of the assistant secretaries to the commander-in-chief; but the union offended her father, and although he welcomed her back to his house on her separation from her husband, she received under his will only the bare allowance of £50 a month, and that was to continue only so long as she lived apart from her husband. Each of the other daughters received £70,000 apiece. Catharine, the second, married in 1815, the sixteenth Baron Saltoun; the youngest, Mary, became the wife on 25th May, 1801, of David Cunyngehame, of Malshanger, Hampshire, and had several children, all of whom were called "Thurlow Cunyngehame."

The chancellor's language was as bad as his morals were lax. Oaths and other expletives abounded in his conversation, and it mattered little whether he conversed with a bishop or a layman. His propensity for bad language was happily hit off by a stuff-gownsman on one occasion, when Thurlow was leaving the court, then breaking up for the long vacation, without one word of adieu. "He might at least," said the bold junior, in tones loud enough to be heard on the bench-"he might at least have said, 'Damn you!"

When he resigned the seals, Thurlow received a second patent of peerage, with a collateral remainder to the issue male of his late brothers, Thomas, Bishop of Durham, and John, alderman and merchant of Norwich. For the elder brother he had secured the most valuable preferment in the Church, and to the bishop's son, who succeeded to the peerage, he gave many lucrative legal sinecures, one of them alone being worth at least £9,000 per annum. The bishop, not to be outdone in generosity at the expense of others, gave before his death, in 1791, to his second son, when an infant, an eccle

siastical office, which he retained until about twenty years ago, and from which he received considerable emoluments without doing a stroke of work.

Thurlow's partiality for men of letters was chiefly displayed towards the "Great Cham" of literature, and Johnson repaid the courtesy. "I honor Thurlow, sir; Thurlow is a fine fellow; he fairly puts his mind to yours,” was his comment, when discussing the characters of the chief lawyers of the day, on the "tiger" of the law. At another time he confessed that he would "prepare himself for no man in England but Lord Thurlow," and to Murphy he acknowledged a feeling akin to apprehension when he knew that he was to meet the chancellor. It is certainly no mean tribute to the conversational powers of Thurlow that he humbled such a talker as Horne Tooke and inspired Johnson with something like fear.

When Johnson desired to obtain the admission into the refuge of the Charterhouse of Macbean, one of his needy assistants, the favor was obtained through Thurlow; and when the doctor's health made his friends plan for him a winter in the milder air of Italy, it was to the kindness of Thurlow that they addressed themselves in the first instance. An increase in the royal pension was the first expedient that suggested itself to the legal mind, and when this suggestion proved impracticable, the liberality of Thurlow prompted him to propose that Johnson should mortgage the allowance by drawing on him for five or six hundred pounds.

Crabbe, when starving in London, addressed to Thurlow an application for aid with a set of verses, but he received from him in reply only a cold expression of perfunctory regret that the exigencies of his vocation did not permit him the leisure for perusing such productions, and the distressed poet was stung into forwarding in answer "some strong, but not disrespectful lines." Through the ready help of Burke, this acute stage of poverty passed away, but Crabbe was

and

much relieved when invited by Thurlow to breakfast with him, to hear his regrets at the neglect of the poems, and at parting to receive a sealed packet containing "not ten, or perhaps twenty pounds . . but a banknote for a hundred." A year or two later, the poet, now an ordained clergyman domestic chaplain to the Duke of Rutland, dined with the lord chancellor, and before they parted Thurlow roared out with his accustomed expletive, "By God, you are as like Parson Adams as twelve to a dozen," and gave him two small livings in Dorset. Crabbe, in gratitude, acknowledged the patronage in the only way open to him. He dedicated to the donor his poem of "The Newspaper."

Although their paths of life had been far apart for many years, a copy of Cowper's first volume of poems was sent to his old friend in February, 1782, with a letter dwelling on the cordiality of their former friendship. To the intense disappointment of the anxious bard, no answer was received, and all that he could do to mitigate the disappointment was to dwell on the pressing business which engrossed Thurlow's attention. A few months later, his proud spirit spoke in indignant strains in his poem of the "Valediction" on his false friend Niger. By the summer of 1791, when Cowper's translation of Homer had been published, the old intimacy of lawyer and poet had been revived. The former had doubts on the propriety of translating in blank verse, and had forwarded his views through Henry Cowper to the recluse at Weston Underwood. They then communicated with one another directly, and the chancellor acknowledged Cowper, after perusing some specimens of his version, that "Homer may be best translated without rhyme." The poet was overjoyed, and imparted to Lady Hesketh with exultation the good news. By the kindness of Mr. A. G. Renshaw of Southend, near Bromley, I have been permitted the privilege of examining a box of letters addressed to Lord Thurlow in the closing month of his official life. They were part of

the papers of Mr. John Forster, of Lincoln's Inn, one of the trustees of Thurlow's estate. Among them is the following letter from Cowper:

Weston Underwood, March 16, 1792.

My dear Lord,—

Mr. Rose, of Lincoln's Inn, son of the late Doctor Rose, of Chiswick, who many years kept an academy there, and an amiable young friend of mine, is on the point of publishing a new edition of Lord Chief Baron Comyns's reports, with notes and references, and being very desirous of the honor of inscribing it to your Lord

ship, has requested me to solicit your permission to do so. He is destined to the Bar, and his labors, I doubt not, will speak for him that he has neglected no means of preparation.

I am myself employed at present in preparing for the press a new edition of the poetical works of Milton, and should Fuseli and my bookseller, who have set me to work, leave me at liberty to choose a patron (which I understand, however, is doubtful), I purpose hereafter to solicit at your Lordship's hands a similar favor for myself.

How I wish, on account of the benefit I might derive to my work from your Lordship's occasional advice and information, that there were not such a gulph between us! But I am doomed to labor, whether as author, translator, or editor. alone, and destitute of those assistances which all others of my fraternity enjoy. I am, my Dear Lord,

With the greatest sincerity,

Your Lordship's affectionate friend and servant,

WILLIAM COWPER.

The young man was Samuel Rose, whose father, it may be remembered, was owner of the Monthly Review, and the volume of reports of cases by Sir John Comyns duly appeared in 1792, with a dedication to the ex-chancellor.

Thurlow was on terms of acquaintanceship, if not of intimacy, with the chief artists of the day, foremost among whom was of course Sir Joshua Reynolds. The painter's sister had married and settled at the pleasant town of Torrington, in Devonshire, and it was in her house that Dr. Johnson, when visiting the country with Sir Joshua, is said to have consumed thirteen pancakes at a sitting! The lady had two