duty which it is to be hoped every barrister (at least in England) would perform as faithfully and as firmly. Had they basely betrayed their illustrious client, and enabled the king to gratify his malicious vengeance upon her head, Lord Eldon and Lord Liverpool well knew there was no favour which their royal master would not have gladly showered down upon them, possibly including, at no distant period, an offer of the very places they themselves then held. Their blame was therefore great in this instance. In the case of Mr. Scarlett, they had not even the excuse a poor one doubtless of the king's caprice. His exclusion from his just rank at the bar was the mere work of common party rancour, or less worthy party contrivance, a work which Lord Thurlow had deemed too dirty for his not very clean hands.

The next remark to which Mr. Scarlett's long and unjust exclusion gives rise, is, that his political conduct, his party honour, his honest and conscientious avowal of his principles, little less unpopular in those days than they were prejudicial to the individuals who held them, reflects on his memory the very highest credit. It is usual for men who know little and think less to make severe comments upon this eminent person, and to describe him as an apostate from the Whig party. It is equally usual for Whig partizans to join in this cry, who never in their lives made any sacrifice to their principles.

We could name men, who never were known for Whigs at all until the party was in possession of power, and who nobly sacrificed to their principles by receiving high and lucrative offices for adhering to the Whig opinions, and further sacrificed by being promoted to still more lucrative office a short time after their first adoption; and yet some of these men have the effrontery to cry out against Lord Abinger for having left their party! When did they and those they act with ever remain one hour out of their just rights and rank because of the Whigs? But Lord Abinger was kept by his Whig principles from being Chief Justice in 1818, and from having the rank of King's Counsel and the ample revenue of leader on the Northern Circuit in 1802, fourteen years earlier than Lord

Eldon by mere compulsion removed the black mark of Whig that stood against Mr. Scarlett's name.

But this is not all, nor any thing like all that is suggested by the history of Lord Abinger. We have noted the injurious effects of his principles upon his professional fortunes. Then of course the party, who are now so loud in their complaints of his desertion, did all that in them lay to indemnify this their zealous adherent for the sacrifices he was making to his connection with them. Kept from his just place in the profession, because he was privately an advocate of Whig opinions, of course they seized the earliest occasion of placing him in Parliament, where he might openly support them by the advocacy of the same principles. The policy of such a course, too, was as manifest as its justice; for no greater gain in force and in weight can accrue to any party, but especially to a party in opposition, than the alliance with able and successful lawyers. Therefore, of course, he was brought into Parliament early in life for some of the Whig seats-close seats afterwards the victims of schedule A?-No such thing; nothing of the kind! Mr. Scarlett, while seriously injured by his principles, saw others daily brought into the House of Commons who had never lost a brief by their adherence to the Whigs; saw Mr. Horner in 1806 seated in Parliament before he was called to the Bar; saw Mr. Brougham seated in 1810 after he had gone a single circuit; saw Mr. Denman in 1817 seated before he could have lost a brief by his principles. All this Mr. Scarlett saw, and he continued a Whig, and continued to suffer the professional pains and penalties of a Whig lawyer under the Eldons and the Liverpools. We do not believe he ever condescended to utter any complaint on this neglect; but we are sure that neither Lord Denman nor Lord Brougham, nor Mr. Horner, had he been fortunately still living, could have mustered up courage to condemn very seriously their truly honourable and learned friend for afterwards quitting a party to which he owed obligations like these. That, however, is not our defence for Lord Abinger; and it is a defence which he never dreamt of making for his conduct in 1831. We only state it for the purpose of reminding the Whig party how little ground they have of per

sonal complaint against him. They have been as loud in their clamour as if, instead of being slighted by them while all but ruining himself for their sake, he had been treated by them with extraordinary kindness and preference during all his professional and political career.

It was not until the year 1818 that the death of Mr. W. Elliott putting a seat at the disposal of Lord Fitzwilliam, that venerable person had the honour of introducing Mr. Scarlett into the House of Commons as member for Peterborough. No one lawyer in practice and of professional reputation already established ever was so successful as he proved in his first efforts. On the question of the Duke of York's salary as guardian of the King's person, he made one of the ablest and most powerful speeches ever heard in Parliament upon a merely legal subject. His subsequent efforts were not such as sustained the great reputation which he thus had acquired. And this was owing to the great imperfection of his character, the vanity which, it must be admitted, formed not only a feature of his mind, but acted on it as a moving power with a more than ordinary force. To this are to be traced the only errors he ever committed as an advocate, errors very few in number considering the vast practice in which he was engaged for so many years, and the constant recurrence of occasions on which this his besetting sin might be supposed to spread snares in his path.

One instance is recorded on the Northern Circuit of his overweening confidence betraying him, when matched against a party who was conducting his own cause. It was a case of libel, and no justification had been pleaded. He was for the plaintiff, and the defendant was throwing out assertions of the truth of the matter, which the judge interfered to check as wholly inadmissible in the state of the record. Mr. Scarlett, with his wonted smile of perfect, entire, and complacent confidence, said, "Oh, my lord, he is quite welcome to showwhat I know he cannot that his slander was well-founded." The man went on, and called a witness or two— nay, he was making much way in his proof, when Mr. Scarlett appealed to the judge for protection. "No (or rather Na)," said Mr. Baron Wood; "I won't it's your own faultwhy did you let him in?" The man proved his case and

got a verdict, to the extreme annoyance of Mr. Scarlett. But this was a trifling matter compared with other consequences of the same foible. He made himself extremely unpopular, both in the profession and in society, by the same course; for his was not, like Lord Erskine's weakness-a kindly, forbearing, recommending kind of vanity, which, if it sometimes made us smile, never gave pain, not even offence, because it never sought to rise by the depression of others. On the contrary, Lord Erskine, with hardly any exception', was the patron and foster-father of other men's merits, lauded their exertions, and enjoyed their success. Not so was Mr. Scarlett's self-esteem; he would rise by depressing others; he would allow nothing to be well done that any but one individual did; he would always intimate how it might have been better done, and would leave little doubt as to the artist whose superior excellence he had in his eye.

This self-esteem and confidence, we have most fully admitted, rested upon a broad and deep foundation of real merit, and it was justified in almost every thing of achieving which a possibility existed. But sometimes it was applied to cases which lay beyond that possibility. Thus to the great debate in the missionary's case already mentioned, he came down wholly unprepared; and the question turned entirely upon the evidence contained in a thick folio volume. This had been carefully studied by all his predecessors in the discussion; - by Mr. Brougham, who brought forward the question; by Mr. Denman, Dr. Lushington, and Mr. Williams, who followed him with an eloquence and an ability of which it is saying enough to declare that to this debate we really, under Heaven, owe the destruction of Negro Slavery. All of these had shown the most complete acquaintance with the evidence in even its minuter details. When Mr. Scarlett addressed himself to the question, he said, in a very careless

Sir A. Pigott was one of them. He had been Mr. Erskine's senior, and, on taking rank, allowed him to go over his head on the Home Circuit, which both frequented. It is difficult to conceive how, after so great-almost irregular -an homage paid to his superior powers, he should have retained so much bitterness against this most able, worthy, and learned person. But so it was. Perhaps he hardly ever showed this kind of evil disposition in any other case. In Sir A. Pigott's instance he showed it unremittingly and offensively. It is the only unamiable trait in his attractive character.

and not a very becoming manner, but with his wonted complacency and confidence, that he had not looked at the evidence before he entered the House, but that his opinion was clear against the motion. So that when the season arrived for the reply, the mover observed that he would have believed almost any improbability on his learned friend's bare assertion, but that this strange statement required something more of proof to make it credible; and accordingly that had been amply provided by the speech of Mr. Scarlett, every part of which clearly showed the strict truth of his assertion that he knew nothing of the evidence.

The same defect was exceedingly injurious to his judicial qualities and reputation. He came late too late - upon the Bench, and he was far from diminishing, by painstaking, the unavoidable consequences of this late promotion. He took the judicial office far too easily; he did not sufficiently work and labour, considering that it was a perfectly new duty which he had to perform a duty less easily performed after a person has grown grey as an advocate. The consequence was, that he who had every one endowment for the constitution of a great judge, - quickness-sagacity-learningintegrity-legal habits-great knowledge of men-practice at the Bar of vast extent and infinite variety-good nature withal and patience, — really made a very inferior judge to many who, having a more modest estimate of their own faculties, a greater respect for others, and a keener sense of the difficulties of their task, exerted those lesser faculties which they possessed far more strenuously than he did his much superior

powers.

He was not raised to the Bench till the change of ministry in November 1834. He had been upwards of forty years at the Bar; and he had held the undisputed lead in the Common Law Courts for about twenty years held it to the last without the least diminution of his favour 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 vigour 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