While the administration of the law flows in pure channels; while the judges are incorruptible, and watched by the scrutinising eyes of an enlightened bar, as well as by the jealous attention of the country; while juries continue to know and to exercise their high functions, and a single advocate of honesty and talents remains, thank God! happen what will in other places, our personal safety is beyond the reach of a corrupt ministry and their venal adherents. Justice will hold her even balance in the midst of hosts armed with gold or with steel. The law will be administered steadily, while the principles of right and wrong, the evidence of the senses themselves, the very axioms of arithmetic, may seem elsewhere to be mixed in one giddy and inextricable confusion; and after every other plank of the British constitution shall have sunk below the weight of the crown, or been stove in by the violence of popular commotion, that one will remain, to which we are ever fondest of clinging, and by which we can always most surely be saved." *

The great truths of religion were early impressed by education on the mind of Lord Erskine, and they continued to exercise, throughout his whole life, a powerful influence over his feelings. It was not the language of the advocate when, on the trial of Paine, he made the following eloquent profession:- "For my own part, I have been ever deeply devoted to the truths of Christianity; and my firm belief in the Holy Gospel is by no means owing to the prejudices of education (though I was religiously educated by the best of parents), but has arisen from the fullest and most continued reflections of my riper years and understanding. It forms, at this moment, the great consolation of a life which, as a shadow, passes away; and without it, I should consider my long course of health and prosperity (too long, perhaps, and too uninterrupted to be good for any man), as the dust which the wind scatters, and rather as a snare than a blessing."

It must be admitted, that in the moral character of Lord Erskine there were failings, which more thoughtful * Edinb. Review, vol. xvi. p. 127.

and prudent men would have avoided; and though it may be regretted, it cannot be a matter of surprise, that he did not exhibit a union of contradictory qualities, displaying at once the ardent temperament of genius, and the blameless and passionless conduct of less sensitive natures. It is unfortunately but too true, to use his own words, that "it is the nature of every thing that is great or useful in the animate and inanimate world to be wild and irregular; and we must be contented to take them with the alloys that belong to them, or to live without them." He was himself as deeply sensible as any one could be of his own failings, for the pardon of which he looked with confidence to the mercy-seat of God. In his speech on the trial of Stockdale, there is a passage which may be regarded as a commentary upon his own feelings. "Every human tribunal ought to take care to administer justice, as we look hereafter to have justice administered to ourselves: upon the principle on which the attorney-general prays sentence upon my clientGod have mercy upon us!-instead of standing before him in judgment with the hopes and consolations of Christians, we must call upon the mountains to cover us; for which of us can present for Omniscient examination a pure, unspotted, and faultless course? But I humbly expect that the benevolent Author of our being will judge us, as I have been pointing out for your example. Holding up the great volume of our lives in his hand, and regarding the general scope of them, if he discovers benevolence, charity, and goodwill to man, beating in the heart, where he alone can look; if he finds that our conduct, though often forced out of the path by our infirmities, has been in general well directed, his searching eye will assuredly never pursue us into those little corners of our lives, much less will his justice select them for punishment, without the general context of our existence, by which faults may be sometimes found to have grown out of virtues, and very many of our heaviest offences to have been grafted, by human imperfection, upon the best and kindest of our affections. No, gentlemen, believe

me this is not the course of divine justice, or there is no truth in the Gospels of Heaven. If the general tenour of a man's conduct be such as I have represented, he may walk through the shadow of death, with all his faults about him, with as much cheerfulness as in the common paths of life, because he knows that, instead of a stern accuser, to expose before the Author of his nature those frail passages which, like the scored matter in the book before you, chequers the volume of the brightest and best spent life, his mercy will obscure them from the eyes of his purity, and our repentance blot them out for ever."

That Lord Erskine was not altogether free from the weakness of vanity, a weakness not unfrequently found in persons who, in other respects, possess the strongest minds, is evident even from his speeches. There is, upon various occasions, an obvious endeavour to introduce himself and his own actions to the notice of the audience; an ungraceful practice, which increased upon him in the later part of his life, and of which an instance may be seen in the debates in the house of lords of the 1st of March, 1806.* It has been said of Lord Erskine†, that "thoroughly acquainted with the world, he even condescended to have recourse to little artifices, pardonable in themselves, to aid his purposes. He éxamined the court the night before the trial, in order to select the most advantageous place for addressing the jury. On the cause being called, the crowded audience were, perhaps, kept waiting a few minutes before the celebrated stranger made his appearance; and when at length he gratified their impatient curiosity, a particularly nice wig, and a pair of new yellow gloves, distinguished and embellished his person, beyond the ordinary costume of the barristers of the circuit."

The demeanour of Lord Erskine in court was to the bench respectful, though never subservient; to the bar, kind, courteous, and engaging. It has been said, that during his long practice he was never known, but upon

Cobbett's Parl. Deb. vol. vi. p. 247. + Annual Obituary, vol. ix. p. 57.

one occasion, to utter a harsh or rude word to those opposed to him, and that, in the single instance in which his temper mastered him, he made ample amends by a voluntary and instantaneous apology.*

In person, Lord Erskine possessed many advantages: his features were regular, intelligent, and animated, and his action is said to have been exceedingly graceful. His constitution was remarkably strong; and it was mentioned by himself in the house of lords †, as a singular fact, that during the twenty-seven years of his practice he had not been for a single day prevented in his attendance on the courts by any indisposition or corporeal infirmity.

SIR SAMUEL ROMILLY.

1757-1818.

SAMUEL ROMILLY was born on the first of March, .1757, in Frith-street, Soho, Westminster. His grandfather, a native of France, retired from that country on the revocation of the edict of Nantz, and settled in England, where his son, Peter Romilly, was brought up to the trade of a jeweller, and married a lady of the name of Garnault, the descendant of a French family: of this marriage the only children who attained the age of maturity were Thomas, Catherine, and Samuel, the subject of this memoir.

He was distinguished in his early youth by great vivacity and sensibility of temperament, the frequent companions of genius. Of his education little has been recorded; but he appears to have been principally indebted for his acquirements to his own exertions, aided by the suggestions and advice of his friend the Rev. John Roget, who subsequently married his only sister. Being originally destined for the profession of an attorney, he + Cobbett's Parl. Deb. vol. vi. p. 247.

• Annual Obituary, vol. ix. p. 59.

was placed by his father under a respectable gentleman in the six clerks' office; but in consequence of the strong predilection which he manifested for the bar, he became, in May, 1778, a member of Gray's Inn, and studied for some time in the chambers of Mr. Spranger. In a letter addressed to Mr. Roget, who was then travelling on the Continent, he gives the following account of the manner in which he passed his time:" You ask me how I spend my time; in a manner so uniformly the same, that a journal of one day is a journal of all. At six or sooner I rise, go into the cold bath, walk to Islington to drink a chalybeate water (from which I have found great benefit), return and write or read till ten; then go to Mr. Spranger's, where I study till three, dine in Frithstreet, and afterwards return to Mr. Spranger's, where I remain till nine. This is the history of every day, with little other variation than that of my frequently attending the courts of justice in the morning, instead of going to Mr. Spranger's, and of often passing my afternoons at one of the houses of parliament."

In another letter to the same correspondent, we find traces of that admirable spirit of benevolence which at a subsequent period directed all his exertions in public life. "Have you ever heard of a book published here some time since by a Mr. Howard, on the state of prisons in England and several other countries? You may conjecture from the subject that it is not a book of great literary merit; but it has a merit infinitely superior: it is one of those works which have been rare in all ages of the world, being written with a view only to the good of mankind. The author was some time ago a sheriff in the country, in the execution of which office numerous instances of abuses practised in prisons came under his observation. Shocked with what he saw, he began to enquire whether the prisons in the adjacent counties were on a better footing, and finding every where the same injustice prevail, he resolved, though a private individual, to attempt the reform of abuses which had become as general as they were shocking to humanity.