BOOKS.

LORD LYNDHURST.*

WE think that both as a piece of literary work, and as a contribution to contemporary history, this book would have been a better one, if it had been less in the form of a vindica- tion or apology. As a mere reply to Lord Campbell's Life of Lyndhurst, which was published no less than fourteen years ago, it seems to come rather late. As a biography, it is so constructed as to suggest to many readers that a biographer who is so per- petually excusing his hero, accuses him.

Political tergiversations at various times and upon various questions constitute the staple of most of the accusations that have been brought against Lord Lyndhurst. Charges of this nature ought always, we think, to be received with caution. A statesman ought to be a man of observation and receptivity, capable of profiting by the additions continually made to political knowledge, and of advancing with the times. If his active career extends, like Lord Lyndhurst's, over more than forty years, it is a serious defect, if he can apply to the questions arising

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• A .Life of Lord Lyedharet. By Sir Theodore Martin, K.O.B. London ; John . of

in the latter part of such a period no more enlarged views than he set out with. It is only when changes of opinion can be attri- buted either to capricious feebleness of mind or character, or when they are so timed as to advance personal interests, that they are justly destructive of confidence.

We think that several of Lord Lyndhurst's most conspicuous inconsistencies may be referred to causes which do him no dis- credit. Upon the Catholic question, the reasons for a change of policy which convinced the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel may well have convinced him. So upon the Corn Law question, as his strength did not lie in political economy or sta- tistics, he may reasonably have deferred to the opinions of such of his colleagues as were more deeply versed in those branches of political knowledge. He is said by Lord Campbell to have been in his early days a Jacobin. Sir Theodore Martin denies this statement, and shows gocd grounds for doubting it. But the matter is of little moment. It is clear from the dates that if Lyndhurst was a Jacobin at all, it was when he was very young. There is nothing to show that he had any personal end to serve by being a Jacobin, or by ceasing to be one. The really serious charge which weighed heavily against him during a con- siderable portion of his life has reference to a period many years later. It was, to put it with absolute plainness, this,—that shortly after his extraordinary abilities had become known to the world through the defefice of Watson, who was tried for high treason in 1817, he, being and being known to his friends to be in political opinions a strong Liberal, went over to the then Tory Government, in consideration of having a seat in Parliament for a Government borough provided for him at once, and of the Chief J ustic,eship of Chester and the Solicitor - Generalship in near expectancy. We think Sir Theodore Martin has treated this charge far too lightly. He does little more than quote from Hansard, Lyndhurst's own defence, often repeated in the House of Lords, and pronounce it to be triumphant. But in truth the evidence on which the charge is founded is very weighty. Lord Campbell may be an inaccurate and prejudiced witness, though we cannot agree with Sir T. Martin in regarding him as a worthless one. But the first Lord Denman, whom Sir T. Martin sneers at as a. bitter Whig partisan, was one of the most upright of mankind, in whom abhorrence of falsehood amounted to a passion. There must be many men yet living who remember enough of Lord Denman to be painfully surprised when his testimony upon a. plain matter of fact within his own personal knowledge is pro- nounced to be of little value. Denman and Copley went the same circuit for many years and were intimate associates and friends. "I remember my father," wrote Lord Denman's daughter, Mrs.. Hodgson, "coming home one day in deep dejection at the acceptance of office in 1819 by his friend Copley, under those who were in direct opposition to his known principles. He never could feel the same friendship for him in after years. On one occasion, when asked by Copley for his support at a Cambridge election, my father answered, `If saying that I know your real principles are the same as my own will help you,, I will do so.'" There is other evidence to the same effect, if we had space for it. For many years afterwards Lyndhurst was taunted over and over again with his political apostacy by men of ability and character, who had the best possible means of knowing the truth. Amongst them were statesmen like Lords Lansdowne, Grey, and Melbourne, and contemporaries of his own at the Bar, like Scarlett and Wetherell. Lyndhurst's answers to these attacks, which seem to Sir T. Martin so conclu- sive, appear to us to involve something not unlike a negative pregnant. They were all, as far as we have been able to refer to them, to the effect that before entering Parliament he had never belonged to any party or political society. We cannot find that he ever made what would have been the plain, straightforward answer, which he could surely have made if it was true, that before entering Parliament he had been what he was afterwards,—a Tory. A man may have strong political opinions, without formally connecting himself with any party or society. Lyndhurst nowhere goes so far as to assert that he bad no political opinions up to the age of forty-six, at which he entered Parliament, nor would such an assertion be easy to credit.

Once in Parliament, his course of action was Tory enough. As Solicitor-General, he boldly justified the Manchester mas- sacre, and assisted in carrying the memorable Six Acts through Parliament. He opposed Catholic emancipation, both under Lord Liverpool and the Duke of Wellington, though when the

Duke changed his views upon that question, Lyndhurst promptly followed him. It is related by Lord Campbell that when the Duke of Wellington's anti-Reform Administration fell in 1830, Lord Grey, the new Whig Premier, was desirous that Lyndhurst should retain the Chancellorship, and there is evid- ence in contemporary memoirs to the same effect. If this was so, Lord Grey must, of coarse, have been satisfied that Lard Lyndhurst was ready to support the Reform Bill, which, as events turned out, he so strenuously opposed. In 1831, Lyndhurst, having brought about the defeat of Lord Grey's Government on the Reform question in the House of Lords, was sent for by the King, and there were rumours that he was to be Prime Minister in a new Tory Government ex- cluding Peel. Again, five or six years later, he is alleged, with great semblance of authority by the writer of his obituary notice in the Timer, to have been in underhand communication with the King, with a view to the formation of a Tory Govern- ment in which he was to be Premier, and Peel was to be ousted from the Conservative leadership. We are unable to say upon what evidence these statements rest. That they should have been seriously put forward is suggestive of a certain want of confidence in Lyndhurst very generally felt during this period of his life, a want of confidence of which there are other indications. The author of the Greville Memoirs lived in intimacy with him, and evidently liked him. But he speaks of him more than once as participating in discreditable intrigues, and as adopting a highly factious course of action in Parliament. So cool and shrewd an observer as Lord Palmers- ton, who had just previously been Lyndhurst's colleague in the Cabinet, after mentioning in one of his familiar letters to his brother, written in 1829, that there had been strange stories current of malpractices of the Chancellor, amounting to abso- lute corruption (which stories were never in any way substan- tiated), goes on to say of these stories and of the Chancellor,— " I do not believe them, though I doubt his integrity of mind; but ho would hardly place his existence so much in the power of any man."

From 1830 to 1840 was the period of Lyndhurst's greatest activity in the House of Lords. He was the master-mind on the

Conservative side, and commanding a great majority, cut down, as far as he could venture, the really popular measures of the Whig Government ; throwing out altogether all such smaller reforms as he thought could be so dealt with without displeasing the constituencies. To his cutting and carving of the Municipal Corporations Bill of 1835, the public is, if we are not mistaken, indebted for the Permissive Bill and Local-option questions of the present day. Here is Sir Theodore Martin's statement of his argument against the establishment of County Courts, a measure which he succeeded in throwing over for many years

- "He then dwelt upon the danger likely to result from placing the

power of settling disputes, often involving intricate principles, in the hands of a tribunal composed of barristers of limited experience, where these securities" (arising from the central system of adminis- tering the law) " for knowledge and freedom from personal bias could not be expected to exist, and skilfully illustrated his proposition by reference to abuses both in this country and abroad, where tribunals of a similar character had prevailed. In conclusion, he said, ' He bad told his noble and learned friend, some time since, that he should con- sider this Bill with candour and fairness. To the best of his ability he had so considered it, and he now thought its principle so mis- chievous, that he felt himself bound, in discharge of the duty which he owed to his country, to Westminster Hall, and to himself, to arrest its progress at this stage.'"

In his policy as leader of the House of Lords he much re- sembled Lord Salisbury, and as Lord Salisbury seems likely to do once more, after the lapse of more than forty years, he forced into the foreground of political discussion the composition and powers of the Upper House. Himself a man devoid of rancour, he yet recklessly infused into the debates of the House of Lords of that day a deplorable amount of acrimony. His indirect con- tests with O'Connell and Shiel,—he attacking them with bitterest scorn in the House of Lords, and they denouncing him in like strain in the House of Commons,—added nothing to the dignity of Parliament.

Upon the formation of Sir Robert Peel's Government, in 1841,

Lyndhurst resumed the Chancellorship. Thenceforward, he seems to have gradually laid aside his habits of pugnacity and invective. Immediately after the fall of the Peel Administra- tion, in 1846, he (alone, we believe, of all the colleagues who had stood by Peel on the Corn-Law question) showed a disposition to lapse into Protection. He unsuccessfully at- tempted to get up a coalition to defeat the Sugar Duties Bill, brought in by Lord John Russell's Government. But after that

time, though he lived for many years with his great mental faculties and even his wonderful memory unimpaired, and though be continued, till past the age of ninety, to address the House of Lords impressively and effectively upon questions that interested him, ho assumed a position more and more out- side the lines of party struggles. Advice and information were thenceforward sought and received from him by statesmen of every variety of opinion. The deference felt for his vast experi- ence, combined with the influence of his admirable social quali- ties, won for him the unique position in which he is best known to the present generation. When he died, in 1863, there were few to remember that the man who had of late held this position had once been one of the most reckless of political partisans.

Sir T. Martin's estimate of Lord Lyndhurst's merits as a Judge appears to us to be wholly wanting in critical dis- crimination. Every Judge has his strong and weak points.

Lyndhurst had, when he chose to exercise it, a marvellous capacity both of mastering and of lucidly stating.the most com- plicated series of facts. But when he came to apply the law to his facts, and had to make up his mind by which of the various discordant principles of law urged upon him by counsel his decision ought to be governed, he was, as an Equity Judge at least, much less successful. Probably he was at his best as a Judge when he was Chief Baron of the Ex- chequer. As a Judge in Chancery, he had the disadvantage of having to administer a system of law of which he had no ex- perience at the Bar. He was so long on the Bench that he might gradually have overcome this disadvantage by labour, had it not been for an indolence which we have never heard denied or doubted until we opened Sir T. Martin's book. During his last Chancellorship, at all events, it was well understood at the Bar that he affirmed the great majority of the decisions brought before him by way of appeal. It is, of course, far less laborious for a Judge of Appeal to express his concurrence with the judg- ment of the Court below than to grapple anew with the question involved, and, if necessary, show substantial reasons for over- ruling it. The present writer remembers, in Lord Lyndhurst's time, hearing a well-known Chancery barrister dissuade a solicitor, his client, from an appeal against a certain decision in bankruptcy, on the ground that the case was so crabbed and complex that it was useless to expect the Chancellor to take the trouble of mastering it. So little careful was he, that in one case, relating to the separate income of married women, he affirmed a judgment first and re- versed it afterwards. It having been seriously represented to him that his first decision had caused great alarm amongst con- veyancers, he quietly directed that the case should be reargued before him by one counsel on each side, and, this having been done, felt no difficulty in tranquillising the minds of the con- veyancers by a second decision directly at variance with his first.

We should have been glad to have had from Sir T. Martin fuller details about Lord Lyndhurst's private life. He loved society, and must have had much intercourse with some of the most conspicuous men of his time. Like Sir John Leach, another Equity Judge of that period, but far more successfully, he affected the manners, dress, and deportment of a man of fashion, and did not like to be thought of merely as a successful lawyer. Even when he was past sixty he appears, from some descriptions quoted by Sir T. Martin—one of them by Samuel Warren—to have, when off the bench, looked like a colonel of cavalry. His tastes, habits, and style of advocacy when, a few years earlier, he was one of the leaders of the Bar, are thus described by Sir T. Martin :—

"Copley had a thorough contempt for the artifices of rhetoric, and too keen a sense of the ludicrous to resort himself, or to be tolerant of the resort by others, to the calculated tones of a simulated pathos, or to the plaintive appeals of a demeanour like what he once defined as the wife-and-ten-children face of Parke.' It was the same disregard of the small conventions and hypocrisies of the barrister's creed which made him disregard the staid airs and sober garb of the Inns of Court, show his handsome • person in a dress turned out by a fashionable tailor, and drive about the streets of London in a smart cabriolet, with a tiger behind him. Lord Eldon, we may believe, was not the only lawyer who was shocked by what must, to people accustomed to accept traditional usages as sacred, have seemed an outrage upon decorum."

Lord Lyndhurst was a most affectionate son and brother, and capable of much disinterested kindness towards men whom he knew and liked. As a dispenser of patronage, indeed, he would have better served the public if he had been a less compassionate man. If it was related to him of an old Queen's Counsel whom he had known at the Bar that he had lost his business, and was falling into poverty, he was very prone to make him a Bank- ruptcy Commissioner. And very indifferent Commissioners several of these worn-out old Queen's Counsel turned out to be. Bnt while thus kind to individuals, Lyndhurst was of that order of men whose sympathies for their fellow-men can only be aroused by actual intercourse with them. Ho had no philanthropy, and never troubled himself about the wrongs or sufferings of masses of human beings with whom he had no personal acquaintance. No down-trodden class or race, between whom and himself there subsisted no personal tie, ever received any substantial help or protection from him. In this, as in most other features of his character, he was the reverse of the great political leader under whom he served so long. Sir Robert Peel was reserved and often ungracious towards individual men, but was power- fully moved by anything affecting the welfare of large masses. Sympathies like Peel's go to make a beneficent statesman; sympathies like Lyndhurst's can do no more than make a man what is commonly called " a good fellow."

Before the appearance of Sir T. Martin's book, we had been accustomed to believe of Lord Lyndhurst that he was a man who looked on life as a game, in which riches and pleasure, honours and power, were the prizes belonging as of right to the most skilful players. We had failed to discover that he ever had aims that were higher than these. We did not doubt that he desired to play the game of life as became a gentleman, or that he was free from petty meannesses and rancours. We cannot honestly say, on closing this book, that our opinion has been materially altered by it. We must still regard Lord Lynd- hurst as a political adventurer. There have been men of that class who, surpassing him in cleverness, in intrigue, and in the power of befooling those who could be useful to them, have risen even higher than he did. But we must go back to Bolingbroke, to find amongst such men Lyndhurst's equal in solid intellectual power, eloquence, and range of acquire- ments. That Sir T. Martin has done what practised skill can do for the reputation of his hero needs scarcely be said. We do not mean to affirm that his book is without grave literary defects. We have already expressed our opinion that its apologetic form is a mistake. There is, too, a want of alternations of light and shade. Lord Lyndhurst stands out from first to last without fault or blemish, in the brightest glare of panegyric. The book is disfigured, likewise, by occasional remarks, both as to Lord Campbell and as to other persons, quite as ill-natured, as appears to us, as any that can be laid at Lord Campbell's own door. But these blemishes notwithstanding, it will be only after carefully weighing Sir T. Martin's views and arguments that the his- torians of the future will assign to Lord Lyndhurst his ultimate place, whatever it may be, in English history.