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LORD ASHBURTON*.

AMONG those eminent lawyers who have been called to the bench, there are very few whose celebrity as barristers has not in a great degree merged in their celebrity as judges. Possibly the adventitious circumstances of rank and station may often have some influence in this respect, so far as regards the opinion of their contemporaries; and of course it must generally be pretty much in proportion as the attention of their contemporaries is directed towards them, that posterity will feel interest in their history, or, if they feel any, will have the means of gratifying it. There is another very obvious reason why the merits and character of the judge should be better known than those of the advocate; which is, that as the very change from the one station to the other has of itself the effect of giving authority to the opinions of him who is thus promoted, so it follows, as a matter of course, that those opinions are recorded with much greater care, and studied with much more earnestness after the change has taken place. Thus, for example, the present generation of lawyers knows very little, and probably thinks still less, of the speeches delivered at the bar by Mr. Philip Yorke, or Mr. William Murray; but many of them have almost daily occasion to renew their acquaintance with the decisions pronounced from the bench by Lord Hardwicke and Mansfield. The reputation of the advocate is even more perishable still, if his labours have not

* Although Lord Ashburton never filled a strictly judicial office, the reader, it is hoped, will not be displeased at this memoir being included in the volume.

may

be

been crowned with the reward of a judicial appointment. He dies and leaves no trace behind him, except perhaps some few floating traditions of his wit or his learning, or his other qualities good and evil, which are speedily chased from the memory by the present feats of his successors; and after the generation of his immediate contemporaries has passed away, his name ceases to be remembered. Some there very who have escaped this common fate; but they are far too few to disturb the general applicability of the rule. The most striking exception to it we know is he of whom we are now about to sketch a brief memoir. The long estrangement of his party from power deprived him of all opportunity of aspiring to the honours of his profession, until it was too late for him to bear them in conjunction with the duties attached to them; and the title which he then thought it worth his while to receive had none but a nominal connexion with a judicial office. His course, therefore, was run entirely at the bar; and his reputation (no mean one) depends altogether upon what he achieved within that career.

John Dunning began life without any of the advantages attendant upon birth and fortune. His family was originally from Gnatham, in the neighbourhood of Tavistock, in Devonshire*; but his father had settled at Ashburton, in the same county where he practised as an attorney. He had married the daughter of a Mr. Henry Judsham, of Old Port, in the parish of Modbury; and the fruits of the match were in all three children, the eldest of whom, a boy, died in his infancy, and the youngest, a daughter, at a more advanced age, but unmarried. The John Dunning of whom we have here to speak was his second son. He was born on the 18th of October, 1731, in the house where his father resided and carried on his business, which house is still standing, and is pointed out at this day to the stranger by the townspeople of

* The name of Dunning seems to be of some antiquity in the county. We have met with a quarto pamphlet by one Richard Dunning, bearing the date of 1686. It contains suggestions for the better and more economical management of the office of overseer of the poor in Devonshire, whereby, as the title page holds out, £9000 a year may be saved. This Richard Dunning styles himself gent. (quære one &c.) and dedicates his pamphlet "to the right worshipful and my honoured masters, the justices of the peace for the county of Devon."

Ashburton, with no little pride and complacency. They have also John Ford, the dramatic author, to boast of as a native of their town, or at least of its immediate vicinity, and of its having produced, in more modern times, two men of considerable note in the world of letters; namely, Dr. Ireland, Dean of Westminster, and Mr. Gifford, the late editor of the Quarterly Review. Each of these received either the whole or a portion of his education at the free grammar school of Ashburton. Dunning was sent thither when he was about seven years old, at a time when it had for its master the Rev. Hugh Smerdon, curate of the neighbouring parish of Woodlands; the same person by whose instructions Gifford profited some five and twenty years later, and to whose situation in the school it was at one period of his life (as may be seen in the memoir affixed to his edition of Juvenal) the utmost soaring of his ambition to succeed.

At this school Dunning remained during about five years; and whatever knowledge he acquired afterwards must have been the fruit of his own unassisted studies, for all the tuition he ever received was while he continued under the care of Mr. Smerdon. The period was short, no doubt, for a regular course of education, and, what was worse, it comprehended a very juvenile portion of his life. But such advantages as he had he certainly made the most of. Young as he was on his first entrance into the school, he very soon distinguished himself from the rest of the boys by the rapidity of his progress. His memory was so remarkably retentive, that he required only a few hours to commit a whole book of Virgil to memory. His reasoning faculty also signalized itself in his fondness for the study of mathematics, of which he very early mastered the elements. When he was little more than ten years old, he had gone through the first book of Euclid; and the diagrams, which he drew on the whitened wainscot of the school-room, were visible there for a long time afterwards. Mr. Polwhele, who has commemorated these particulars of his youthful studies in his History of Devonshire, says Dunning has often been heard to declare later in life, that he owed all his success to Euclid and Newton. Whatever intimacy he had cultivated with the last of these was not commenced, we are inclined to think, at Ashburton school.

When taken from thence, he could not have been more, at the utmost, than thirteen years of age; and he was immediately placed as an articled clerk in the office of his father, who at that time had no other views for his son than to make him first his partner and afterwards his successor. The talent and the assiduity of young Dunning caused a change in this plan. It was not very long before he qualified himself to take a leading part in the business of the office. Several monuments of his industry as a clerk are still to be met with in the neighbourhood of Ashburton, such, for instance, as family deeds and settlements, written throughout by his own. hand, and bearing his signature as an attesting witness. Many pages also, of the proceedings in the parish books are of his writing, and are signed J. Dunning, junior: these occur not only during the time when he was residing in his father's house, but afterwards when he was merely making occasional visits there. He continued thus to perform the duties of a clerk till he was about nineteen, when his talent and the knowledge of law he had already acquired were discovered by one who foresaw their chances of success on a more lofty theatre, and suggested to his father the propriety of sending him to the bar. It is said that this came about in the following manner. A deed or legal instrument of some kind was to be drawn up in the office, and the task fell upon young Dunning, who completed it and sent it off in his father's absence to the person for whom it was intended, and who, being a lawyer, was to settle it himself. The old gentleman, on his return home, heard what had been done, and, full of anxiety for the credit of his office, immediately dispatched a note of apology, excusing himself for any errors that might happen to be found in the draft, on the ground of his not having had an opportunity of revising and correcting it with his own hand, the whole having been written by his son, a lad under nineteen. It proved, however, that there was no sort of necessity for excuse. No fault of any kind could be found with the draft, and indeed it was such as to give a very favourable idea of the proficiency of the youth who had drawn it. The lawyer to whom it had been sent was no other than Sir Thomas Clarke, the Master of the Rolls, who had a considerable property in the neighbourhood, and for many years had employed old Mr. Dunning

as his steward. He immediately set about inquiring further into the young man's ability, and finding the expectations which this first sample had created more than realized, he strenuously recommended the father to send him at all sacrifices to the bar, offering, if need might be, to assist him with his own purse, during the preparatory period of keeping terms. In pursuance of this counsel, young Dunning was entered of the Middle Temple.

The date of his admission, according to the entry in the Society's books, is May 8th, 1752, at which time he was in the twenty-first year of his age. The chambers he occupied, if not from his first coming into residence, at least during a portion of the time he remained a student, and for a long while after he was called to the bar, are known, by a tradition current in the Temple, to have been the second floor set at No. 1, Pump Court, on the side farthest from the cloisters. Here he laid up the greater part of those stores of legal knowledge, which afterwards stood him in such good stead, when he came to have daily opportunities of drawing upon the hoard. He is said rarely to have quitted his rooms before the evening, except when attending the Courts; the fore part of the day being entirely devoted to reading. We have no means of knowing what method he pursued in his studies, nor can it be stated with certainty, whether he pursued them entirely alone, or with the assistance of any practitioner either at or under the bar: there is reason, however, to believe that he never became pupil to a pleader, though he strongly recommends such a course to others. In a letter written by him much later in life, to a young man about to commence his studies for the bar, he gives some directions as to the choice of books, and the different means of acquiring legal knowledge, among which it is to be supposed are to be found some at least of those which he himself adopted. We shall extract a passage from this:

"I would always recommend a diligent attendance on the courts of justice; as by that means the practice of them, a circumstance of great moment, will be easily and naturally acquired. Besides this, a much stronger impression will be made on the mind by the statement of the case, and the pleadings of the counsel, than from a cold uninteresting detail of