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TO CORRESPONDENTS.

We must take this opportunity of expressing our sincere thanks for the offers of assistance that we have received; many of which are very valuable.

We have endeavoured in every case to give a private answer to them through our publisher; and if we have failed in any instance, we trust that this general notice will be received as an apology. If we have not availed ourselves of any of these offers in the present Number, it is because to that extent our arrangements have been long complete. We regret, however, that some delay has taken place in the publication of this Number, which was almost unavoidable; but we do not anticipate that it will again occur.

NOTE TO ART. I., p. 24.

The number of codes referred to in Art. I., we find, is much below the truth. There have been eight given since the beginning of the present century, and there are eleven in all Europe, besides those of France.

THE

LAW REVIEW.

ART. I. -LORD CHANCELLOR ELDON.

The Public and Private Life of Lord Chancellor Eldon, with Selections from his Correspondence. By HORACE TWISS, Esq., one of Her Majesty's Counsel. 3 vols. 8vo. pp. 1646. London. Murray, 1844.

It is inconsistent with the plan of this work to give elaborate criticisms of books that appear, though their subject may often be such as recommend them in a peculiar manner to the attention of the legal profession. We do not therefore intend at present to review fully or formally the volumes before us, and especially we mean to give no extracts from them; but after pointing out their merits which are great, and their defects which are comparatively few, we shall proceed to lay before the reader such observations upon the subjects handled in them, and more especially upon the eminent person whose biography they contain, as appear to be most conducive towards preserving the truth of contemporary history, free from the errors or perversions with which party or personal feelings are but too apt to pollute its stream or divert its

course.

It would be very inadequate praise of Mr. Twiss to say that he had performed his task respectably. He has done it extremely well, both in maintaining, generally speaking, a candid and fair tone, in judiciously selecting his materials, and in adopting a style of composition, plain, correct, well suited to his subject, seldom offending against the rules of sound taste. The profession, of which he is an esteemed member, and to the honours of which he is well entitled, are

laid under great obligations to him for his work, obligations no way less than those which he has conferred upon the worthy and distinguished family who have furnished him with his materials, in so far as those were not accessible to all in the known history of Lord Eldon's times. There is great distinctness in his narrative, and it is well varied and enlivened by such extracts from the correspondence of the Scotts as tend to bring the reader acquainted with their nature and habits: it is interspersed with such explanations and explanatory references as help to spare the reader trouble; and it is not loaded or encumbered with dissertation, though the author is never disposed to shrink from the remarks which his own opinions seem to call for. If the main object of a biographical composition be, as it doubtless is, to present us with a lively picture of him who is its subject, then has Mr. Twiss amply attained it; for no one can rise from reading his book without having impressed on his mind a very distinct portraiture of Lord Eldon's private and personal character, although he may also have occasion to cast a darker shade than the writer has done upon some parts of it, and to bring certain weaknesses more into relief, which his friendly pencil has left obscure. It is a different but a higher praise to which he is entitled, that the opinions, though not disguised, are not obtruded, of the biographer himself, and that an exemplary spirit of fairness, and even forbearance, seems to guide his mention of those who were Lord Eldon's, as they are his own, adversaries in the party contests of the day.

The main defect of the work is, that the Politician occupies a disproportioned space, and the Lawyer's dimensions shrink in the same degree. Yet Lord Eldon was little of a statesman, and indeed describes himself a year after his first Chancellorship had expired, as being "no politician" (letter to Lord Melville, vol. ii. p. 17.); and he was, on the other hand, a very great lawyer, beside holding the Great Seal for nearly five-and-twenty years, much longer than of his predecessors. Yet the "Life of the Lord Chancellor" is much more filled with accounts of parliamentary speeches, in which he never had any excellence, and in which he took no kind of delight, than with accounts of either his forensic or his judicial exertions. Of the sixteen or seven

any

teen hundred pages whereof these volumes consist, not fifty are devoted to trace the peculiar qualities of his conduct as an Equity Judge, an office he filled for a quarter of a century, filling likewise the greater part of twenty volumes of reports with his cases; for the ninety pages that precede this portion of the book are only a defence against the charge of delay, or rather an argument in explanation of that charge; a couple of pages record all that is said of his success as a Common Law Judge, although he valued himself more upon that than upon any portion of his public life, and indeed held the office of Chief Justice above a year and a half; while of his qualities as an advocate hardly any thing is said beyond a full account of the State Trials in 1794, although he was at the Bar threeand-twenty years, during eleven of which he held its highest offices. There are still living many members of the profession who could have given Mr. Twiss accurate information both regarding Lord Eldon's forensic powers and his abilities as a Common Law Judge; but indeed the reports are sufficiently full to afford materials on the latter subject; while, for describing his Equity proceedings and his conduct of Appeal business in the House of Lords, there are incomparably more rich materials than are to be found to illustrate the judicial history of all his predecessors together; the reports which we have in the time of Lord Northington being both meagre and incorrect, those of Lord King somewhat better, those of Lord Hardwick extremely poor, and those of Lord Thurlow the very worst of the whole. This defect is a very serious one in Mr. Twiss's book, and makes it probable that, with all his great and acknowledged merits, it will be found that he has left the Life of Lord Chancellor Eldon, Lord Chief Justice Eldon, and Sir John Scott, to be yet written, unless he shall make a very considerable addition to those volumes in the subsequent editions, to which we nowise doubt the work will come.

If the volumes of Vesey, Merivale, Swanston, and Bligh have been too little resorted to, the Anecdote Book of Lord Eldon has perhaps been too much cited. For dates and facts no authority could be more unexceptionable or more valuable. As a repository of jests it is of far less merit, not only because the noble collector's taste in this kind was far from