for the last twenty years of his practice, his professional income averaged £17,000 a year. But a writer in the Quarterly Review speaks of having heard him say, that the largest income he ever made in one year was but little more than this (£18,500); so, perhaps, the other statement is somewhat exaggerated. His income, however, though it has in our day been surpassed, must have been very large, and we cannot but regret that Mr. Campbell Scarlett has given us no information in respect of it.1

Here the autobiography ends. There are besides some very interesting sketches by him of his contemporaries; and two chapters, one on Public Speaking, and the other on the Causes of his Success at the Bar; but the account of his later life is made up from his correspondence and his son's narrative; and this, the most important and interesting part of his professional career, is treated with provoking meagreness and indifference.

Up to 1827, Mr. Scarlett adhered firmly to the Whig Opposition, although he was too much absorbed by his profession to take a prominent part in politics. In 1818, through the influence of Lord Fitzwilliam, he was returned to Parliament for the borough of Peterborough. Lord Brougham bears testimony to his consistent opposition, notwithstanding his West Indian connections, to slavery and the slave-trade, and he with equal consistency opposed all religious disabilities, and Romilly early taught him his own principles in regard to the reform of the law, and especially the barbarous criminal code; but as a Parliamentary reformer he was more languid in his feelings than the Whig leaders generally, and it was his difference with his old friends on this subject that eventually landed him in the Conservative party.

His success at the Bar he does not overstate; and it will be asked, what were the qualities that gave him such success? Before speaking of these, however, we ought to say that Sir James Scarlett, like Mr. Choate, has suffered greatly from the ana and gossip of magazine writers, who have dwelt upon his intellectual peculiarities and mannerisms, — nay, even blemishes, — and enforced them with apocryphal stories of his feats at the

1 How greatly the English Bar has increased since Scarlett's time, is shown by a comparison of the Law List for 1817 and for 1877. In the first named year there were twenty-nine King's Counsel; in the last named, one hundred and ninety-seven. In 1817, the number of barristers was about seven hundred; in 1877, nearly, if not quite, six thousand! Meanwhile the population has not more than doubled.

Bar, as if these were his strong characteristics; the inference being that, by copying these, young lawyers may achieve equal

success.

He had great knowledge of law, and readiness in using it, great quickness of apprehension, great powers of analysis and of argumentation, a most sure-footed judgment and most consummate tact. His power, too, of concentrating his mind upon the matter before him must have been remarkable. Besides these, his greatest gifts, and which reveal the secret of his success, he had other personal advantages which helped to make that success almost unique. He was a man of much general culture; his person was handsome, and his bearing that of a gentleman; his manners were winning; his voice sweet and musical; and his speaking, although hardly eloquent, singularly persuasive. With such qualities and with constantly increasing experience, it is no wonder that he became in time a consummate advocate before both common and special juries and also with the courts; for his success in arguing questions of law, both at Nisi Prius and in Bank, before a bench that included during his time men like Lords Ellenborough and Tenterden, and Bayley, Holroyd, Littledale, Parke, and Patteson, was not less eminent than his success with juries, and he is said to have gained an ascendency over Lord Tenterden equal to that which Erskine had previously gained over Lord Kenyon, or which Sir Richard Bethell subsequently obtained over Vice-Chancellor Shadwell.1

This description of him, we think, is borne out by the testimony and criticisms of his contemporaries. His own remarks upon public speaking, and the account he gives of his personal success, though tinctured with egotism, are interesting and instructive. He avoided rhetoric or oratory, and defends his action in this respect with considerable ingenuity. He likewise never composed any part of either his opening or his reply. It was on the last, when leading for the plaintiff, that he principally relied, unlike Copley, who always sought to carry his

1 His great argument for the defendant in the case of The King v. Burdett, shows how admirably he could argue questions of law.

Touching his influence over Lord Tenterden, an amusing anecdote is told of the retort of Mr. Adolphus, the eminent criminal lawyer, when Scarlett rather arrogantly told him to remember he was not at the Old Bailey. "I feel I am not at the Old Bailey," he replied; "for there the judge controls the counsel, but here the counsel controls the judge."

case by the impression he made in his opening presentation of it.

"I made it my business to know and remember the principal facts, to lay the unimportant wholly out of memory; to open the case, if for the plaintiff, and when I expected evidence for the defendant, in the shortest and plainest manner, with no other object than to make the jury comprehend the evidence which they would shortly hear. I I very seldom thought it necessary to make any anticipation of the defendant's case. It is, indeed, oftentimes dangerous to do so, as it leads the judge and jury to seek for support to it in the plaintiff's evidence. I found from experience as well as theory, that the most essential part of speaking is to make yourself understood. For this purpose it is absolutely necessary that the court and jury should know as early as possible de quâ re agitur. It was my habit, therefore, to state, in the simplest form that the truth and the case would admit, the proposition of which I maintained the affirmative and the defendant's counsel the negative, and then, without reasoning upon them, the leading facts in support of my assertion. . . . Moreover, I made it a rule in general rather to understate than overstate facts I expected to prove."

"From these remarks it will appear that my success did not in the least depend on those tirades of declamation which make the reputation of a speaker. Not in the most considerable and difficult cases in which I have carried the verdict can any one who reads the printed speech either take any interest in it, or even understand it without reading over and understanding the whole evidence."

Much the same was true of Mr. Mason. In his 'masterly defence of Avery, the Methodist minister, where he won a very doubtful and difficult case by a management similar to Scarlett's method, his speech which carried the jury has no particular interest or value, except as an analysis and discussion of the facts and evidence disclosed at the trial. Viewed in that light, however, it is entitled to very high praise.

"I learned by my experience that the most useful duty of an advocate is the examination of witnesses, and that much more mischief than benefit generally results from cross-examination. I therefore rarely allowed that duty to be performed by my colleagues. I cross-examined in general very little, and more with a view to enforce and illustrate the facts meant to rely upon than to affect the witness's credit, for the most part a vain attempt."1

1 He once said of Mr. Topping, an eminent leader on the same circuit, that his idea of cross-examination was putting over again every question asked in chief in a very angry tone.

Serjeant (afterwards Mr. Justice) Talfourd, the most successful of literary lawyers, thus describes him, while he was in full practice at the Bar.

"What Johnson said of Burke's manner of treating a subject is true of his management of a cause, 'he winds himself into it like a great serpent.' He does not take a single view of it, nor desert it when it begins to fail, but throws himself into all its windings, and struggles in it while it has life. There is a lucid arrangement, and sometimes a light vein of pleasantry and feeling in his opening speeches; but his greatest visible effort is his replies. These do not consist of a mere series of ingenious remarks on conflicting evidence, still less of a tiresome examination of the testimony of each witness singly, but are as finely arranged on the instant, and thrown into as noble and decisive masses, as if they had been prepared in the study. By a vigorous grasp of thought he forms a plan and an outline, which he first distinctly marks, and then proceeds to fill up with masterly touches. When a case has been spread over half a day, and apparently shattered by the speech and witnesses of his adversary, he will gather it up, condense, concentrate, and render it conclusive. He imparts a weight and solidity to all he touches. Vague suspicions become certainties, as he exhibits them; and circumstances light, valueless, and unconnected till then, are united together, and come down in wedges which drive conviction into the mind."

A country attorney, Lord Brougham tells us, paid him perhaps the highest compliment, when he said of him, “ Really there is nothing in a man getting so many verdicts who always has the luck to be on the right side of the cause."

"I have it," says Mr. Campbell Scarlett, "on Lord Chelmsford's authority that the Duke of Wellington said of my father: When Scarlett is addressing a jury, there are thirteen jurymen.' Mr. Scarlett thinks this was the origin of the sobriquet of "the thirteenth juryman," by which his father went, one by the way that sounds better than it really is. We rather doubt this, and think the Duke's remark was only confirmatory of an already well-known designation.

There are occasionally causes, however, for which he was not so well fitted as many inferior men of intenser feelings. His nature was somewhat timid, and his temper cold. He would seem to have lacked enthusiasm. Thus he could not have conducted with success such a defence as Erskine did in the case of Hardy, nor would he have appeared to advantage as counsel for Queen Caroline. He would, indeed, have conducted the prose

cution in both those cases with eminent tact, humanity, and ability; but their defence required qualities which he wanted. Perhaps his most important political case was The King v. Pinney,1 tried at the bar of the King's Bench in 1832, when, with Mr. Campbell and Mr. Follett as his junior counsel, he successfully defended the Mayor of Bristol against a criminal information for neglect of duty during the Reform riots in that city; but here political disappointment and somewhat bitter hostility to the Reform Bill and towards those who had introduced it, gave an intensity to his feelings in regard to the case that he did not usually display.

At times, too, his dislike of the side he was on prevented his making so earnest an effort for his clients as we think he otherwise might have done. In the case of Ambrose Williams,2 tried for a libel on the clergy of Durham Cathedral, occasioned by its bells not tolling on the death of Queen Caroline, where his personal sympathies were doubtless rather with the defendant, he does not seem to us to have pressed the case as earnestly as he could; and his unfortunate suggestion that the bells of the cathedral might not have tolled because the grief of the clergy was too deep for such utterance of it, gave Brougham the needed opportunity for launching forth into one of the greatest pieces of invective in the English language. A similar criticism may be made of his defence of the Wakefields for the abduction of Miss Turner. The case was, from the beginning, hopeless, and public indignation was justly excited against his clients. But the defence, though ingenious, does not strike us in reading it as either an earnest or a strong one; and his opening remarks about the duties of an advocate (which singularly contrast with Lord Brougham's declaration on the subject at the Queen's trial) were then out of place, and could not have failed of doing harm.

But these were exceptions, such as are found in the lives of all great lawyers, to his ordinary management of a cause. How eminent he really was is well shown in a comparison between him and his greatest successor, the lamented Sir William Follett, contained in an address delivered by the late Sir John Taylor Coleridge — and we cannot name a more competent or trustworthy critic on his "Recollections of the Western Circuit,"

1 2 Townshend's Modern State Trials, 272.
2 Id. 231.

8 Id. 112.