bell, "will preserve his name as long as the English language endures."

Thomas Erskine was born in the year 1750, and died in the year 1823. He lived and flourished from the latter part of the reign of George III to the period just preceding the dawn of the Victorian Era,-at a time when modern constitutionalism was finally asserting itself over the archaic institutions of a crumbling and abandoned past. He, together with Burke, Fox and Chatham, and their contemporaries in the new republic across the Atlantic, laid and completed the foundations upon which rest the constitutions of the English speaking races of today.

Erskine was not of proletarian origin; he did not come of the masses,-that class proverbial for furnishing the great leaders of history. He was of noble lineage, born to the purple. His family was an aristocratic one, with a proud escutcheon, and a title running back several centuries. It would therefore seem paradoxical that he should have developed into an advocate of popular rights and democratic principles. He presented that rare combination of an aristocrat socially and a democrat politically,a type of public man, which, when capable of leadership, and enjoying the confidence of both classes of society, constitutes a tremendous power for social and political advancement, and which any political society in any age would be fortunate to enumerate among its members. This type is more readily to be found in England than elsewhere, due, no doubt, to a strict adherence there to class distinctions, and to a rapid development of its government along democratic lines. Thomas Jefferson and Robert Toombs were American examples of this type.

From whatever environment he may have sprung, Erskine possessed unbounded talents, and used them for the good of his country and mankind. Nature, when she distributes her favors, is as quick to stop at the palaces of the mighty as at the hovels of the poor. Genius and talent

know no social bounds; they respect not the distinctions of caste or wealth.

By virtue of his family Erskine mingled in the best society. Wherever he went he was much admired for his elegant manners and brilliant conversational powers. After the manner of his time, he could easily have made a marriage of convenience by uniting the noble house of Buchan with one of wealth and social distinction. He was, however, independent in spirit, and had little respect for the artificial honors of birth and high position. He once congratulated himself upon not knowing any lord outside of his own family.

He became involved in an affair of the heart with an elegant lady of a noble but impoverished house. As he was a frivolous youth, without fortune, the marriage was looked upon by his admirers as ill-advised and inauspicious. He, however, unmindful of their solicitations, rushed into matrimony with that blind impetuosity, born of the ardor of youthful love, which, so often, upon retrospect, seems to have been a divine guidance, leading to some goal of fortune which human ingenuity and manipulation might never have attained. "This rash step," says one of his biographers, Professor Goodrich, of Yale, "would to most persons have been the certain precurser of poverty and ruin; but in his case it was a fortunate one. It served to balance his mind, to check his natural volatility, to impress him with the sense of new obligations and higher duties."

There seems to be an ideal union or affinity between two individuals of opposite sexes, a force analogous to that chemical attraction which draws together atoms of different elements, and welds them into a compound physically transformed, with new attributes and powers different from those of the constituent elements, the new combination possessing a new force and a new energy, with a potentiality to accomplish that which the elementary substances

separate and alone could not do. While the elements apart may be dead and futile, in compound they are ofttimes alive and dynamic. So with the union of the human elements, there is a natural force, which when operating unrestrained, free from the impediments and the pressure of false and detrimental social usages and customs, will draw together two such individuals into a proper and efficient marriage union. Like Darwin's law, it may be termed a natural selection-an operation of natural forces more potent in welding and cementing two individuals into that dual entity created by a union of the sexes than all the fiats of man expressed in the statutes of the State or the canons of the Church. A beautiful exposition of this theory is found in Goethe's "Die Wahlverwandtschaften."

A modern commentary upon such thoughtless and reckless marriages is found in some recent observations by Prof. Headley, of the University of London. In discussing some recent marriages between actresses and frivolous. young men of the British nobility, he says: "Mating should be a matter of impulse. The man who cautiously hunts for a great heiress or a girl of suitable social position is not the one who will do great or heroic deeds. It is most natural that these young men who have bravely thrown convention or fortune to the winds for the sake of a beautiful face should make our best soldiers. When a man has married the woman he desired most ardently he is naturally happy and enjoys increased powers of mind and body in spite of some apparent unhappy exceptions. The lesson in short is that a man should marry the girl he loves without regard to conventions or material conditions."

Speaking of the influence of Erskine's marriage upon his career, Judge Emory Speer, in a short sketch of the great advocate delivered at Mercer University in 1908, says: "It surely seems essential to the rapid and continuous progress towards eminence at the bar that the young lawyer, like

the otherwise immovable terrapin, must have a coal of fire on his back. I use this metaphor to indicate the ardent and stimulating effect of judicious matrimony, and hasten to protest against the incinerating or scarifying idea the suspicious or malevolent might suggest. It was Lord Kenyon, I believe, who stated to the young advocate of wealth whose advancement had been slow, 'Sir, you must spend your fortune, get you a wife, then spend her fortune, and then you will go to work.'" It was Sir Edward Clarke, who, when asked to name the three essentials of success at the bar, replied: "To be very poor, very ambitious, and very much in love." President Wilson, in his essay, "When a Man Comes to Himself," says: "It happens to the man who marries for love, if the love be true and fit for foul weather."

At any rate, Erskine's marriage turned out to be most felicitous. It must have formed an ideal compound. It was the making of the man. He found himself. In a happy and helpful union he laid the foundation for a most brilliant and eminently successful career at the bar. It would seem that with a combination of talents and domestic felicity there is no goal which cannot be reached through work and perseverance. No doubt the realization of his own happy domestic surroundings, and the consciousness of their beneficial effect upon him, together with that broad spirit of democracy inherent in his nature, inspired Erskine, when, in the defense of Bingham, he turned to the aristocracy of England, gathered before him, and admonished them as follows:

"Let the nobles of England, if they mean to preserve that pre-eminence which, in some shape or other, must exist in every social community, take care to support it by aiming at that which is creative, and alone creative, of real superiority. Instead of matching themselves to supply wealth, to be again idly squandered in debauching excesses, or to round the quarters of a family shield; instead of continuing their names and honors in cold and alienated embraces, amid the enervating rounds of shallow dissipation, let them live as their fathers of old lived before them. Let them marry as affection and prudence lead the way, and in the ardors of mutual

love, and in the simplicities of rural life, let them lay the foundation of a vigorous race of men, firm in their bodies, and moral from early habits; and instead of wasting their fortunes and their strength in the tasteless circles of debauchery, let them light up their magnificent and hospitable halls to the gentry and peasantry of the country extending the consolations of wealth and influence to the poor."

Another one of the foundations of Erskine's brilliant success as an orator was his familiarity with the classics. In this his marriage again exerted a controlling influence. Prof. Goodrich, referring to the period immediately after his marriage, when he spent two years of leisure with his regiment in Minorca, says: "In the society of his wife he now entered on the systematic study of English literature, and probably no two years were ever better spent for the purposes of mental culture. As a preparation for his future efforts in oratory they were invaluable. In addition to his reading in prose he devoted himself with great ardor to the study of Milton and Shakespeare. A large part of the former he committed to memory, and became so familiar with the latter that 'he could almost, like Porson, have held conversations on all subjects for days together in the phrases of the great English dramatist.' Here he acquired that fine choice of words, that rich and varied imagery, that sense of harmony in the structure of his sentences, that boldness of thought and magnificence of expression, for which he was afterwards so much distinguished." Lord Brougham declared that Erskine was "more familiar with Shakespeare than almost any man of his age, and Milton he had nearly by heart."

This

In Greek and Latin he was not at all proficient. should give some consolation to the young lawyer who has struggled in vain over the Anabasis of Xenophon and the Odes of Horace. Indeed, a mastery of Shakespeare and Milton affords a good substitute for the classics of antiquity.

Erskine's call to the bar was accidental. Perhaps it would be better to say it was providential. That great con