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not make any figure in the House of Commons, for the reason, probably, that Scarlett mentions; and for four years in the House of Lords he was nothing but an ordinary law-lord. But, in 1831, when the opportunity offered and he took hold of debating in earnest, although then fifty-nine, he became one of the greatest speakers the Upper House has ever seen. In our country the instances are very numerous; and in France, many might be found like Odillon Barrot, Berryer, Baroche, and Rouher.

A man may succeed at the bar, and fail in Parliament; but the converse is true, as Wedderburn's case shows. The greatest debater in the House of Commons was Fox; yet Lord Brougham says, and says, we think, justly, "I never was more clear of any thing that had not been tried, than I have always been, both that Fox must have failed and Pitt succeeded completely at the bar." Much versatility of talent is not always a gift bestowed even on the greatest men.

To return to Scarlett: in Parliament he remained consistently attached to his principles, and saw, not without a querulousness a little unmanly, men who were younger, and whose qualifications were inferior to his own, except that they were Tories, pass before him to the highest honors of his profession. The same thing had happened to Romilly and other eminent Whig barristers, who, unlike him, died before reaching the goal of an English barrister's ambition. Lord Brougham, praising justly his fidelity to principle, thinks that if he had early gone over to the Tory party, he would have become Attorney-General, before the time at which he was made King's Counsel, and have succeeded Lord Ellenborough, in 1818. There may be some doubt as to this. Lord Eldon, greedy of power, and jealous of any possible rival either in the House of Lords or in the Cabinet, systematically kept down those barristers whose great abilities made him fear that they might become such in the future, and reserved his favors for those whom he thought, from lack of Parliamentary ability, he had no reason to fear; and he would certainly not have liked to see Scarlett Lord Chief Justice.1

1 Lord Ellenborough's appointment, first as Attorney-General, and afterwards as Lord Chief Justice, was the work of Addington, the Prime Minister, and before Lord Eldon had fairly got hold of the Great Seal. Copley's promotion as Solicitor-General, the beginning of his great career, was, as is well known, owing to Lord Castlereagh. Lord Eldon always feared and disliked him.

At length, in 1827, when Mr. Canning became Prime Minister, a portion of the Whig party, headed by Lord Lansdowne, joined him, and Scarlett succeeded Sir Charles Wetherell as Attorney-General, and was knighted; and he then left the Northern Circuit, which professional rules would no longer allow him to attend. His tenure of office was less than a year; for when, after Canning's death and Lord Goderich's failure to carry on a coalition government, the Duke of Wellington became Prime Minister in January, 1828, he resigned with the rest of the Whigs. He, however, returned to office after the passage of the Roman Catholic Emancipation Act, in 1829, which broke the Tory party in twain, and compelled the Duke to seek assistance from the Opposition.

This was the beginning of the political tribulations that tended, when he finally joined the Conservative party, to embitter him against his old associates, a bitterness that his family naturally shared, and which shows itself very perceptibly in these memoirs.1 It was, undoubtedly, expected by the Whigs, that the Duke of Wellington would eventually bring forward some measure of reform, to which the whole Whig party were deeply pledged, and likewise would invite Lords Grey and Lansdowne and others of their leaders to the Cabinet, and Scarlett accepted office with the approval of his party. But the Duke, an intense Tory at heart, and who had been made a Reformer, in his own despite, by circumstances, had no idea of doing either. He rather sought a reconciliation with the Protestant Tories; and, on the first day of the session of the new Parliament, in 1830, he recklessly threw down the gauntlet to his Liberal supporters, by declaring a most uncompromising and bitter hostility to any Parliamentary Reform whatever. The Protestant party, however, were not

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1 Some of Mr. Campbell Scarlett's readings of English history are new, to say startling; as, for example, that "the Conservative Opposition at last defeated the Reform Government, and returned to office" (p. 9); that "Mr. Canning had accepted the appointment of Governor-General of India, but the King was anxious that he should take the seals of the Foreign Office instead," (p. 105); that Lord Grey, as well as Lord Fitzwilliam, supported Mr. Canning in 1827 (p. 106). Mr. Scarlett, likewise (pp. 100, 101), dwells with complacency on George the Fourth's regard for his father, as something of which his family has reason to be proud. We had supposed that, in these days, all agreed that the greatest compliment George the Fourth could pay to a public man, was to hate him with the bitter hatred he entertained towards Grey, Brougham, and Denman.

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conciliated, and, uniting with the Whigs, whom this declaration necessarily threw into active opposition, they turned out the government.

When, therefore, his old friends at last came into power, Sir James Scarlett was placed in a most embarrassing position, which was rendered more difficult by the great unpopularity he had incurred as Attorney-General, from filing several criminal informations against Tory newspapers for libels on the Duke of Wellington, the Lord Chancellor, and others. He does not seem to have been invited to remain in office, but he had reason to expect from the Ministry promotion to the Bench notwithstanding; and it is still a mystery why, in the following January, Lord Lyndhurst, who had early deserted the Whigs and had no claim whatever on them, was appointed, instead of him, to be Chief Baron. Probably the explanation is that Lord Lyndhurst was the greater adept at intrigue for office. If, however, the great Whig advocate had been able to support the Reform Bill, and had remained a member of his party, he would doubtless have succeeded Lord Tenterden as Lord Chief Justice, in 1832. But the extent to which it was proposed to carry Parliamentary Reform alarmed him; he strongly opposed the Ministerial measure, and, before the vacancy in the great office to which he had always aspired occurred, he had irrevocably and most ostentatiously committed himself to the Opposition. Then, in times like those, when political animosities were so aroused, his appointment was as much out of the question as that of Mr. Black or Mr. O'Conor would have been, in 1864, to succeed Chief Justice Taney.

Sir James Scarlett's natural sorenesss at the disappointment, which seemed then for ever to exclude him from the great prizes of his profession, was intensified by unjust and bitter attacks upon him for desertion of his early principles. The disappointment, however, was only temporary; for, by one of those extraordinary instances of good fortune, which so seldom occur except in fiction, William the Fourth, in November, 1834, astonished the world by dismissing his Whig ministers, and the Conservatives

1 "The new Attorney and Solicitor General took their offices with a notice that, if a vacancy or vacancies in any of the chief judgeships took place within a few months, they were not to be offended if Lord Lyndhurst and Sir James Scarlett were promoted over their heads."- Lord Brougham.

came into office for four or five months. Lord Lyndhurst then resumed the Great Seal, and Sir James Scarlett succeeded him. as Lord Chief Baron. In January, 1835, he was also raised to the peerage, as Baron Abinger, - the name of an estate he had purchased in Surrey.

"He had been," says Lord Brougham "upwards of forty years at the Bar; and he had held the undisputed lead in the commonlaw courts for about twenty years; held it to the last, without the least diminution of his favor among clients. This is unexampled in the profession of the common law, unless in the case of Mr. Garrow; and it is unexampled because the practice of nisi prius requires youthful vigor as well as other less fleeting qualities. Even Lord Erskine, in less than that period of time, showed plain symptoms, not certainly of decaying faculties, but of declining practice. For the last five or six years and more of his brilliant career, his business greatly fell off. . . . It is certain that Mr. Garrow passed both Mr. Erskine and Mr. Gibbs, -the latter for nearly ten years before he retired upon the Bench."

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Lord Abinger's career as a judge was so inferior to his career at the Bar, that it has often been said that he failed in that capacity a statement which, though false, is so flattering to mediocrity that it is sure to be readily believed. He undoubtedly had qualities that might have made him, had he succeeded to the Bench earlier, or applied himself more diligently to its duties, an eminent judge his intellect and temperament seem to us to have much resembled Lord Mansfield's, and had he become a Lord Chief Justice fifteen years earlier, when his energy and ambition were undiminished, we see no reason why he might not, like Mansfield, have added a distinguished judicial, to a distinguished forensic, reputation. He came to the Bench late in life, and, from relaxing industry, he did not apply himself with much ardor to his new and unusual duties. This may be accounted for partly by the state of his health, for Mr. Scarlett tells us that soon after he became Chief Baron, he was "grievously afflicted with a complaint near his right eye," which continued through life, and compelled him always to wear a large shade over it. Few of his judgments bear signs of much labor, and probably vanity and self-confidence, besides declining health, helped to make him somewhat indolent in the labors of his office.

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Moreover, he was rather overshadowed by a remarkably able succession of associates, two of whom, Parke and Alderson, rank among the greatest judges of the century, and were then in the full vigor of their powers. So far from his long career at the Common Law Bar mąking him a technical judge, one of his faults was a too great disregard of strict rules and precedents and a too great inclination to decide each case on what seemed to him the abstract merits of the controversy. This is very apparent in those cases in which he dissented from a majority of his court, like Cornfoot v. Fowke, and Gibson v. Carruthers,2 where the basis of his judgments is a rather loose equity grounded. on the hardship of the cases themselves, and he pursues a course of vague and somewhat diffuse reasoning rather difficult to follow or to reconcile with established legal principles, in striking contrast to the lucid precision of statement, accuracy of learning, and almost mathematical clearness of demonstration that distinguish the admirable judgments of Baron Parke. In the business of the House of Lords he took no active part. During the Chartist troubles he became something of an alarmist; and some charges to grand juries, which his son has preserved, sound like those delivered during the times of the French Revolution, and would have shocked, we fancy, his early friend, Romilly.

Lord Abinger's private life appears to have been most exemplary. His letters to his family and friends exhibit an unusually kind and affectionate disposition; he was fond of society, and all who met him bear testimony to the charm of his manners and the brilliancy of his conversation. After the disease in his eye, however, he was forced to give up general society. He seems too, from childhood, to have been of a religious disposition, and his son records an instance of his once taking an eminently nisi prius view of the Evidences of Christianity, and declaring “that, independently of moral conviction, there was sufficient circumstantial evidence of the truths of Christianity to convince any twelve unprejudiced and enlightened jurymen."

He died of apoplexy at Bury St. Edmunds, while on circuit, on the 27th of April, 1844, and was buried at Abinger. He was in his seventy-fifth year.

1 6 M. & W. 358. This case is reviewed in 3 Amer. Law Rev. 480.
2 8 M. &. W. 321.

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