round the room.-(O'Regan's Memoirs of Cur ́ran, p. 36.) · LORD CAMDEN. The portrait of Lord Camden will ever occupy a most distinguished place in the gallery of English lawyers. In the course of his arduous professional life he supported, with one single exception, those great principles of constitutional freedom to which many of our lawyers have been the determined enemies. His argument in Murray's case (1752)-his judgment in that of Wilkes, and the general tenor of his conduct in parliament, especially on occasion of the American war, were all highly honourable to his judgment and his integrity. In the one instance to which an allusion is made above, the sound political principles which actuated him upon other occasions appear to have been forgotten. He defended the issuing of an illegal proclamation, on the dangerous ground of state expediency, and in the debate on this question the spectacle presented itself of Lord Camden arguing on the side of the prerogative, and Lord Mansfield on that of the constitution. It would, however, be most unjust to allow a single aberration from political rectitude to weigh against a life zealously devoted to patriotic services. The eloquence of Lord Camden is said to have been distinguished by its captiva. ing and graceful simplicity, and by appeals to the judgment rather than to the passions.* MR. HARGRAVE AND CICERO. The splendid talents of Mr. Hargrave as á lawyer are universally acknowledged, and the debt of gratitude due to him from the profession has always been cheerfully paid. It must, however, be confessed, that in some instances he did not manifest that discretion which might have been expected from a man of his sound judgment and rare talents. He was essentially a lawyer, and whenever he stepped out of the pale of his profession, it was with the loss of some portion of that high reputation which waited upon his legal character. "Mr. Hargrave," says the ingenious author of the Pursuits of Literature, "is universally acknowledged to be one of the soundest and most learned lawyers in the Kingdom; but when he will step out of his way and turn rhetorician, and fancy he is writing like Cicero de Oratore, there is some difference be * He was born in 1713, and terminated his long and honourable life in 1794. tween the English and the Roman Advocate." The passage which gave rise to this remark may be found in the preface to Sir Matthew Hale's "Jurisdiction of the Lords' House of Parliament," in which Mr. Hargrave has panegyrised the Rt. Hon. Charles Yorke in the following strain. "He was a modern constellation of English Jurisprudence, whose digressions from the exuber ance 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 of even his highly cultivated reason, and so made elevation and extinction contemporaneous, and whose prematureness of fate has caused an almost insuppliable interstice in the science of English equity." "'* The preface to the law tracts likewise furnishes some instances of the very extraordinary style which the learned recorder of Liverpool occasionally assumed. *The following are the lines in the "Pursuits of Literature" to which this passage is appended: "With Hargrave to the Peers approach with awe, And sense and grammar sink in Yorke and law." THURLOW AND WEDDERBURNE. "We all remember when Thurlow and "Wedderburne (now the Lords Thurlow and Loughborough) were first called into Parliament, how soon they proved what manner of men they were. They separated the lawyer from the statesman. It was a proud day for the bar at that period; for never before that day, were such irresistible overbearing powers and talents displayed by the official defenders of a minister: Hos mirabantur Athenæ Torrentes, pleni et moderantes fræna theatri. "Lord North indeed, when he appointed Thurlow and Wedderburne (his) Attorney and Solicitor General, meant no more than to give spirit, eloquence, and argument, to his measures; but in effect he hung a mill-stone on the necks of all their successors." (Prefatory Epistle, prefixed to the Translation of the Greek and Latin passages in the Pursuits of Literature, p. 26.) "Lord Loughborough, who owed to Lord North his recent elevation to the peerage, constituted one of his ablest advocates and most zealous supporters in that house. Wedderburne had risen through the gradations of the law, amidst the discussions of Parliament, side by side with Thurlow. More temperate, pliant, artful, and accommodating in his manners, than the chan |