duct:-"He was afterwards Lord Chancellor, with no character in any station but for his abilities, saving that of integrity in causes, which I never heard doubted. He had the greatest skill and power of speech of any man I ever knew in a public assembly."

There exists, so far as we are aware, no printed work from Lord Harcourt's pen. Among the Harleian MSS. in the British Museum, there is a small quarto volume of about 500 pages, entitled in the Catalogue, "Sir Simon Harcourt's Common-Place Book for a Justice of Peace," and having the signature" Sim. Harcourt, 13 August, 1724," pasted into the first page*, evidently in the same handwriting with the manuscript itself. It consists of a collection of authorities on criminal law and practice, arranged under alphabetical heads, after the manner of Burn's Justice. Many of the titles, however, are left in blank, and not more than about a third of the whole volume is written through. Under the title “Alehouses," for instance, eight blank pages occur; under “Attainder," "Homicide," "Bastardy," &c. six or seven; and the whole appears a miscellaneous sort of compilation, without much attention to the arrangement of the subjects. In the same volume are bound up the charges to the Buckinghamshire grand jury, to which we have before referred.

Lord Harcourt was thrice married. By his first wife, Rebecca, the daughter of a Mr. Clark, he had three sons, Simon, whose death we have already mentioned, and two others who died in their infancy; and two daughters. By his other ladies he had no issue. He was succeeded in his titles and possessions by his grandson, who many years afterwards (Dec. 1st, 1749) was advanced to an earldom. On the death of his grandson, the last venerable and gallant earl, without male issue, in the year 1830, all the honours of the family became extinct, and its possessions passed into the hands of the Vernons. In them, however, in compliance with his direction, the name of Harcourt survives, and may yet possibly confer lustre upon a new line of nobility.

* The date assigned to the MS. in the Catalogue is 1705; the autograph date above mentioned was most probably transferred from some other document.

204

LORD MACCLESFIELD.

HISTORY, it has been often said, teaches no less by its warnings than by its examples. Fortunately for our country, the time has long been past when she had cause to fear the taint of judicial corruption poisoning the pure sources of justice, or the solicitations of personal ambition or aggrandizement casting their shadow over "the broad, pure, and open path" of the judges of England. Amid the multitudinous complaints of governmental and official abuses, and not least of the grievances inflicted by the law and its ministers, to which a thousand tongues and pens are daily giving currency, no voice is heard to breathe a whisper of imputation against the unblemished purity of the judicial ermine. While the ascendancy of public opinion excludes from the high places of the profession those among its members whose character or practice would have dishonoured it; while the responsibility to public opinion—were no higher principle in action-secures the exercise of an unswerving integrity in those who have attained them, the warning to be derived from the life of a Bacon or a Macclesfield can find no application. But though this is happily the case, the spectacle of great talents and a noble mind, overpowered by the temptations of a venal age, and betrayed to reproach and uselessness, will scarcely be viewed with the less interest, because we may fear no longer to fall into the same condemnation.

Thomas Parker, Earl of Macclesfield, was born on the 23rd of July, 1666, at the town of Leek, in Staffordshire, where his father, of the same name, was a practising attorney. He was descended from a junior branch of an ancient and

respectable family, which had originally borne the name of Le Parker, traced its descent as far back at least as the reign of Richard II.*, and had at one period enjoyed a considerable estate in the counties of Stafford and Derby. Of his early years or course of education we have no further account, than that he was sent at the usual age to perfect his studies at Trinity College, Cambridge; which, however, if we may trust the accuracy of the "Graduati Cantabrigienses," he quitted without taking any degree. A copy of adulatory verses, addressed to him when Lord Chancellor by the poetlaureate Eusden (who was himself a fellow of Trinity), would lead us to infer, if poetical evidence commanded implicit credit, that he was not a little distinguished as a university student:

Prophetic Granta, with a mother's joy,

Saw greatness omened in the manly boy,
Who madest thy studies thy beloved concern,
Nor could she teach so fast as thou couldst learn.
Still absent thee our groves and Muses mourn,

Still sighing echoes the sad sound return,

And Cam with tears supplies his streaming urn."

That he was designed from an early age for the bar is manifest from the period of his admission to the Inner Temple,14th February, 1683, when he was not yet seventeen. Hutton, in his History of Derby, affirms that he practised for some years in that town as an attorney, and finally ceased to reside there only on his appointment to the chief-justiceship; a story disproved at once by the date of his call to the bar, as it appears on the records of the same Inn-24th May, 1691, not many months after the expiration of the required term of studentship. It is very probable that he settled there in the outset as a provincial counsel; a personage so much less frequent in those days than at present, that the worthy antiquary may well be excused for his misconception. He proceeds to describe to us, with laudable preciseness, the dwelling occupied by our lawyer in the good town of Derby: "in Bridge-gate, at the foot of the bridge, in the house next the Three Crowns." On the Midland Circuit, which Mr.

* We find the name of Le Parker among the gentry who volunteered to accompany Edward I., when Prince of Wales, to the Holy Land, in 1270.-Excerpta Historica, p. 271.

Parker chose as the first field of his professional labours, his local connexions speedily introduced him to business; nor was it very long before his reputation both as a lawyer and an advocate became so high, as to advance him to leading practice: such, indeed, were his powers of persuasive oratory, as to procure for him the appellation of the "silver-tongued counsel." It is not, however, until the first year of Queen Anne's reign (1702), that the occurrence of his name in the Reports leads us to conclude that he had transferred the exercise of his talents and attainments to the more conspicuous arena of the metropolitan courts: after that period it is frequently to be found, and almost always in connexion with cases of some importance and extent;-we may particularise, out of many, the elaborate legal defence of Tutchin, the obnoxious publisher of the Observator (1704), and the case of Kendall v. John (1707), an action brought by a candidate, who was seated on petition, against the returning officer for a false return, an experiment which doubtless grew out of the decision in the case of Ashby and White.

At the period of the general election in 1705, when the Whig party, to which Parker had warmly attached himself, was almost universally successful, he had acquired sufficient local influence to be returned, in conjunction with a member of the Cavendish family, for the town of Derby, of which he had some years before been elected Recorder; and this seat he retained without interruption until his elevation to the bench five years afterwards. The government had, about the same time, apparently discovered either his usefulness as a partisan or his claims as a lawyer; for in the month of June in the same year, he was at once called to the degree of the coif and appointed Queen's serjeant, and not long afterwards honoured with knighthood. What degree of reputation he acquired in parliament we have no means of judging from contemporary testimony; for neither is he noticed on a single occasion as a speaker, in the meagre outlines which are preserved to us of the debates, nor, so far as our researches have informed us, is he made mention of by any of the annalists or reminiscents of his time: most probably his reputation as a lawyer was the chief distinction which attended him through his parliamentary as well as his professional career. The only occasion on which

he is recorded as having conspicuously distinguished himself, was one much more of a forensic than a parliamentary character; we mean the impeachment of Sacheverell, against whom he was named, in conjunction with Walpole, Jekyll, Stanhope, King, &c, one of the managers for the Commons. Burnet particularises him as having acquitted himself more ably than all these eminent colleagues; a distinction the more remarkable, since it appears that he was suffering under indisposition at the time. He was assigned to maintain the fourth article of the charge, which was by much the most general of them all, and alleged against the Doctor that he had falsely charged the Queen and her functionaries, civil and ecclesiastical, with a general mal-administration, tending to the subversion of the constitution; had excited her subjects to faction and violence, and, to serve these purposes, had wrested and perverted texts and passages of Scripture. To support these allegations, it became the accuser's duty to dissect the obnoxious sermons paragraph by paragraph, and shew their general character and design to be a virulent attack on all, in whatever station, who, however well-affected and obedient to the established sovereign and government, deemed the resistance of the Revolution lawful, and were not prepared to assert, for all future cases, the absolute doctrine of passive obedience :a task which he undoubtedly performed with great force and effect. The scriptural passages which the doctor had pressed into his service, he shewed to have been perverted to a sense, in many cases, absolutely opposed to their true meaning: and he closed with a forcible denunciation against the abuse of the pulpit to factious and partisan purposes, which we transcribe as a specimen at once of his oratory and his orthodoxy:

"My Lords, the Commons have the greatest and justest veneration for the clergy of the Church of England, who are glorious through the whole Christian world for their preaching and writing, for their steadiness to the Protestant religion when it was in the utmost danger. They look upon the order as a body of men that are the great instruments through whose assistance the Divine Providence conveys inestimable advantages to us all. They look upon the Church established here as the best and surest bulwark against popery, and that therefore all respect and encouragement is due to the