'So that when the season arrived for the reply, the mover (Brougham) 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 proof had been amply provided by his speech, every part of which shewed the strict truth of his assertion that he knew nothing of the evidence.'

The Autobiography is principally made up of desultory observations and reminiscences. Nearly a third of it consists of sketches and characters of contemporary orators, statesmen, and lawyers Pitt, Burke, Fox, Sheridan, Grey, Erskine, Romilly, Eldon, Ellenborough, Tenterden, Redesdale, Gibbs, Perceval, Pigot, Plummer. These are carefully drawn, but we cannot say that they either enlarge our knowledge or vivify our impressions. Indeed, it is to be regretted that the time and labour expended on them were not devoted to the completion of the narrative, which is silent as to his public (apart from his forensic) life, and stops short before his promotion to the Bench and the peerage. What his son, the accomplished diplomatist, has done towards supplying the deficiency, has been done with discretion and good taste; but he has contributed little beyond extracts from correspondence and other documents, which he has not attempted to work up; and absence from England on public service during most of the time to be covered is no excuse for not furnishing at least a recapitulation of leading events with dates. We do not even learn from this book when, or under what circumstance, his father first entered the House of Commons. It was not in fact till 1818, many years after he was in the fulness of his fame, that a seat was found for him by his party connections, his claims having been successively postponed to those of Brougham, Horner, Denman, and many others. He was then elected for Peterborough, on the nomination of Lord Fitzwilliam, and sat for it till the General Election of 1830, when, at the request of his noble patron, he exchanged it for Malton. In 1827 he accepted the Attorney-Generalship under Canning, with the full approbation of his Whig friends. He resigned it on the death of Canning, but resumed it under the Duke of Wellington in 1830:

'The Duke of Wellington had emancipated the Roman Catholics and repealed the Corporation and Test Acts. The Whigs hoped he would go further in reform, and my father, who had always been in favour of a moderate Reform Bill, entertained a hope that the King's hostility to a reform in Parliament might be overcome, and the Duke would get rid of the ultra Tories and fill up the gap with a greater infusion of the Whig element in the Cabinet.'

As

As law officer he exhibited the most determined hostility to the Press, and referring to the prosecutions instituted by him on behalf of the Government, he writes, Jan. 4, 1830:

เ

Bagshot Park, Jan. 4, 1830. You will see all that I know about the libels in the papers, but will not read all I said. My speeches are not agreeable to the Press, or entitled to be faithfully and fully retailed. They all join to abuse me, but I know I have done my duty, and am not afraid. The liberty of the Press does not consist in the power of publishing slander with impunity any more than the liberty of using your hands implies the power or the right to assault your neighbours with impunity. This is a mistake which the gentlemen of the Press too often make. The liberty of the Press means nothing more than the right to publish without a previous censorship.'

According to this definition, the liberty of the press might be co-existent with any amount of high-handed corruption in judges or servility in juries and would in no respect depend upon the administration of the law; although it is matter of history that there have been times during the non-existence of a censorship, when the freedom of comment accorded to journalists little exceeded that enjoyed by Figaro when he started his Journal Inutile. Scarlett's hostility to the Press was said to be in no slight degree owing to the tone taken by the newspapers on the occasion of a false report of his death in 1824: when the obituary notices, although fair enough on the whole, fell short of his own estimate of his merits.

Speaking of the change of Government in 1830, Mr. Scarlett says that the Whigs would wait no longer for liberal measures and a hoped-for modification of the Duke's Cabinet, to which modification he had not assented. Soon after the King's death they united with the Radicals to turn him out, and brought in their famous Reform Bill.' The Whigs could hardly be expected to wait after the Duke's declaration against reform, and it was the discontented Tories, headed by Sir Charles Wetherall and Mr. Bankes, that turned the scales against the Duke. Scarlett went out at the same time, but we suspect he might easily have been persuaded to remain in, and he was both angry and disappointed at being so completely overlooked. This, perhaps, had something to do with the line he took in regard to their 'famous' Bill, to which, in its essential features, he was decidedly opposed. He made a speech against it, which, he says, 'was highly praised for its good constitutional arguments, though condemned by the "Times" and the Radical prints.' This led of course to the resignation of his seat, but, whilst the Bill was yet pending, he had offers of seats from Lord Lonsdale and Mr. Alexander

Alexander Baring, without any pledges as to men or measures. I hesitated between Baring and Lord Lonsdale, but as the latter required no trouble, and was a more declared adhesion of party, I thought it best to close with it.' He soon afterwards became a member of the Carlton Club and an uncompromising Tory. How completely he cast his skin may be inferred from a letter to his son, dated Liverpool, August 20, 1835 :—

'The Whigs grow more unpopular every day out of doors. This town is an example, that almost every decent and respectable man that once supported them has abandoned them. Their only party consists of a few of their ancient orators, and the rabble that were accustomed to follow them. As the party in town live with each other exclusively, they are deceived with a notion that all the world think as they do. You will observe that even some of the very Peers created by Lord Grey begin to abandon them; but such is their infatuation that they will not believe in the very small and contemptible minority which supports them, or they are determined to throw still more power into that minority in order that they may be better supported.'

This contemptible minority had just regained office and managed to hold it for six years. In the course of the following year Lord Brougham wrote to invite him to Brougham Hall.

'You will find me, what I fear you will regard as very destructive in my principles, but always ready to do you the most ample justice (as I ever have been), knowing few men indeed who have made greater sacrifices to their principles.'

Lord Brougham must have been both amused and astonished by the reply, in which, pinned to the letter of his ironical avowal, he is told: 'I must say that I am sorry to learn from your note that I am still to rank you as a destructive.' Scarlett was supported by the examples of Sir Francis Burdett and Sir Robert Wilson, who operated the same change of front about the same time; yet surely when a man past sixty feels compelled to leave a party of which he has been a conspicuous member from youth, he should not join the opposite party. Separation need not involve tergiversation, and he would best consult his personal comfort as well as his reputation by holding politically aloof from both. There is something positively humiliating in the apprehension Scarlett expressed in a conversation with Lord Holland, of 'proscription and exclusion' by his former associates, as well as in the assurance it called forth, that the time might come when the old ties might be partially renewed.

In his reply to Lord Holland, April 24, 1831, he said it was far from his intention to join any party to oppose the Govern

ment.

6

ment. It was my determination to have resigned my seat and to have abandoned all public life whenever I found I could not maintain my neutrality.' If he had adhered to this determination he would have been made Chief Baron instead of Lord Lyndhurst, or had he been content to wait, might have been rewarded with the grand object of his ambition, the Chief Justiceship of the King's Bench, vacated by Lord Tenterden in 1832.* In the same letter, after repeating that he had been pressed to join the Duke of Wellington's Government by many of his political friends, and emphatically by Lord Fitzwilliam and Lord Grey,' he continues :

'Nevertheless when the Government was changed, I was dismissed from office, sans phrase. I was not desirous of continuing in office. But I freely own that I did expect from a Cabinet composed, with one exception only, of my personal friends, some explanation or some kind words at parting. They could not consider me, after the station I had occupied, and if I am not too vain, in the station I continued to occupy, as a mere hanger on upon a Ministry, subject to the mandate of a Treasury note. I declined however to enter into any engagement to oppose the Government. On public grounds I was anxious for its permanence and its success. But what was the impression produced on the members of my own profession when they contemplated the situation of one to whom they had long ascribed the first place amongst them, and of whom it had been their habits to think for twenty years that his unfortunate party attachments alone had kept him from the highest stations? There were two opinions. One that I was most scandalously treated, the other that it was the immediate intention to make some arrangements to remove me from the Bar.'

Was he emphatically pressed by his political friends to remain in office after the Duke's declaration against Reform, or after they had made up their minds to turn out the Government? and how can his alleged anxiety for the permanence and success of the new Government be reconciled with his hostility to the great measure by which they were to stand or fall, or with his eager preference of a seat from the ultra-Tory, Lord Lonsdale, as a more declared adhesion of party? We never heard it said that he was scandalously treated, because he was not included in the Whig arrangements of 1830, but his position was one which may well have elicited the sympathy of the Bar. It was distressing to see a man of his age and eminence thrown back, divested of official rank, into an arena where (for him) there was

The new Attorney and Solicitor General took their offices (in 1830) with a notice that if a vacancy or vacancies in any of the chief judgeships took place within a few months, they were not to be offended if Lord Lyndhurst and Sir James Scarlett were promoted over their heads.'-Brougham.

no

no additional honour to be won- -where, day after day, with inevitably decreasing vigour, he had to keep the lists against all

comers.

'Like to the champion in the fisty ring

Was called on to support his claim or show it.'

What he by no means regarded as a compensating or extenuating circumstance, whatever others might think of it, was the rising reputation of his son-in-law, who had gradually become one of the most formidable of his competitors. Lord Campbell, a remarkable man in many ways, was especially famous for turning his great talents and opportunities to the best account, and it was Lord Abinger who said of him, 'If Campbell had been bred a dancer, I do not say he would have danced better than Vestris, but he would have got a higher salary.'

The elevation of Lord Denman to the Chief Justiceship was another source of mortification, to which he did not hesitate to give vent; threatening to withdraw altogether from the Court of King's Bench, and remarking that it would be singular if he and Lyndhurst (then Chief Baron) could not between them convert the Exchequer into the more effective and attractive tribunal of the two. He remained unapproached and unapproachable to the end of his career as leader, a period of more than twenty years. This is pronounced by Lord Brougham to be unexampled at the Common Law, unless in the case of Mr. Garrow. 'It is unexampled, because the practice of Nisi Prius requires youthful vigour as well as the 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... It is certain that Garrow passed both Erskine and Gibbs.' Scarlett's estimate of the man who performed this feat may be useful in exemplifying by what arts or qualities a high professional position may be won:

'Garrow, an eloquent scolder with a fine voice and most distinct articulation, a great flow of words, considerable quickness in catching the meaning of a witness, and great abilities in addressing juries in ordinary cases, without education, without taste, and without law, acquired and maintained a high reputation with the public, but none in the profession. He had a theatrical manner of doing everything, and that which an ordinary junior at the Bar would have done with simplicity, without effort and without applause, Garrow gave importance to by an affected arrangement, an appearance of a difficulty overcome, and withal a certain tone or manner that made the vulgar suppose the thing could not have been done but by the greatest talent and genius. Perhaps there never was an instance of a man whose fame stood at once so high with the public and so low with the Bar.

He