THE LIFE OF LORD CHIEF JUSTICE KEN YON.* WHEN' a
third biography of a man is written, this question natu- rally arises,—Is it required ? Has the career of that man been so eminently distinguished as still to afford fresh lessons to his suc- cessors, or does it throw fresh light upon his contemporaries' deeds, or, not being a man more celebrated than numberless able and hard-working men who have made a mark in their day, have his previous biographers, from unfairness or from want of materials, not done proper justice to his character ? Or again, can more light can be thrown upon those men with whom became in contact, through the discovery of unpublished documents? If, however, none of these reasons can be given, the publication of a new biography is entirely without a raison d'être, is reprehensible, in that it multi- plies needlessly the authorities to which the reader of the history of the day will refer, and the writer of it has laid himself open to have his work rigorously compared with that of his predecessors, and to be judged by the severest standard of criticism. Now in one thing only is this work superior to that of Mr. Townsend or Lord Campbell ; it is adorned at the be- ginning with a picture of Lord and Lady Kenyon. It in no way justifies Mr. Kenyon's apologetic preface, it is quite flat and colourless, it gives the reader no fresh impression of Lord Kenyon in any of the three roles in which he is looked at as advocate, judge, or politician, nor does it bring forward any fresh traits of his private life and character. The "Life of Lord Kenyon," by Mr. Townsend, in his Lives of Eminent Judges, is spirited and truthful ; it shows carefully the Chief Justice in the various parts he played, it gives anecdotes of his career in Court and out of Court, it shows by reference to and by quotation from the various Reports the style and manner of Lord Kenyon's judg- ments. It is true that the life which followed by Lord Campbell is marred by an egotism and by a mean criticism which is thoroughly offensive, but not more so than are all Lord Campbell's works, and he does not fail to give many examples of the real goodness which lay at the bottom of Lord Kenyon's rough character, as the admiration which he had for Erskine, for when told of certain of the latter's immoralities which were about the surest things to arouse his dislike, he merely exclaimed, "Spots on the sun,—only spots on the sun." The fact seems to be that Mr. Kenyon has laid his hand on a few unpublished letters and diaries, which, however, add nothing fresh to our knowledge of the lawyers and politicians of the reign of George Ill., and he has on the strength of these and of Lord Campbell's many ill-natured remarks thought that the world needed a new biography of his able, but not very brilliant ancestor, which the world certainly did • The Mid of Lloyd, First Lord Kenyon, Lord Chief -reality of England. By the Hon. G. T. Kenyon, MA. London: Longmane. 1873.
not. One whole chapter of forty-five pages in a book of about four hundred is devoted to Lord Thurlow, to a sketch of his posi- tion in Mr. Pitt's ministry, and to an attempt to show by five unpublished documents that Thurlow was not intriguing against his colleagues at the time of the King's first illness. But these, on the contrary, so far as they are important, seem to make it more clear that Thurlow was undoubtedly intriguing with Fox and the Prince of Wales, for to receive letters from members of the Opposition, in which a sentence that "I should be very glad of an opportunity of conversing with you upon the terms that nothing of the conversation shall be re- membered but by mutual consent" is found, is strong evidence against the upright conduct of a politician. Again, relative to the still doubtful reasons of Lord Temple's resignation of the seals of Secretary of State, for he was a minister for two days on the formation of Mr. Pitt's Ministry in December, 1783, Mr. Kenyon (on p. 131), "from private information," assures us that Pitt refused him a place, on account of the impracticability of working with him. Now, had Mr. Kenyon given any real refer- ence, he might have been the means of rendering a somewhat curious historical point clear, but "private information" is much too vague a thing upon which to base any historical argument, and, moreover, this explanation is quite opposed not only to the belief of contemporaries, but it is an un- doubted fact that during a long public career, this resignation was one of the few things which ever seriously disturbed Pitt, just as he was entering on a new ministerial career. So until some- thing more certain than Mr. Kenyon's information—which, for all we can tell, is but one of the numberless reports abroad at that time, and which has found its way into some correspondence— turns up, Lord Stanhope's conclusion will be accepted by the world as the most probable as yet put forward. It would be wearying to point out all the faults in this useless book, but simply to show its imperfection, we will take the first to which we can turn, Lord Ken- yon's letter of advice (p.396) to a young student, which is given verba- tim. In Townsend's life we have not only the Chief Justice's reply, bat also the name and letter of the writer, which makes the answer far more interesting; but judging from the old Law Lists, the ingenu- ous inquirer does not appear to have profited by the advice, for his name is not to be seen in subsequent lists of counsel. The life of Lord Kenyon was a singularly smooth and uninteresting one ; the lives of all successful lawyers are usually the most uninteresting of any, for in nine cases out of ten they have arrived at eminence in their profession by a quiet drudgery and by a negative line of conduct which is the most barren of incidents likely to interest their suc- cessors. And of no man is this more true than of Lord Kenyon, for he was never a brilliant advocate, and his success was due to his careful study and sound knowledge of law, about the only great trial in which he took part when at the Bar being that of Lord George Gordon, where he was completely eclipsed by his junior, Erskine. Neither does he seem ever to have made a very large annual income, the largest sum he made in one year being £11,038 us.; but the following year this had dropped to £7,406 3s., while about £6,000 was the average income during the last ten years of his career. On the other hand, his contemporary Dunning, after- wards Lord Ashburton, for the last two years, when an account was kept, made 18,000 per annum ; and from these figures it is clear that the income of successful barristers at the present day is cer- tainly much greater than it was seventy years ago, for it is the "good lawyers" who obtain the largest fees, and no two men answer more to this description than Dunning and Kenyon ; and in spite of the cries about the overcrowding of the legal profession, we feel quite sure that not only do the stars of the legal firmament obtain very much greater profits, but that even to the ordinary practitioners the law is more profitable at the present time, and that the gains have increased in a greater ratio than the cost of living. But just now, when the questions of what are called Equity and Common Law are being much spoken and written about, it is not uninteresting to notice that Lord Kenyon not only sat for twenty-four years as Lord Chief Justice of England, but that for four years he administered Equity as Master of the Rolls, after practising for twenty-two in the Common Law Courts, and that he proved quite competent to exercise jurisdiction in both Courts, though the great majority of cases, turning upon questions relative to the rights to real or personal property, would present less difficulty to a man of Lord Kenyon's erudition than to many more able but less well-read lawyers. There is little else to notice in this work. Kenyon, being so thoroughly a man versed in the "endless myriad of precedent," coming to the Chief Jasticeship immediately after such a man as V Lord Mansfield, is an uninteresting subject to rest long upon, and his career affords very little that is unusually instructive or amusing.. The sterling quality of his character is clearly shown by the attach- ment of his friends, and he is chiefly remarkable as an example of the successful lawyer, as distinguished from the brilliant advocate, or even broad-minded judge-legislator, and for this very reason his career affords little opportunity for comment, little more so, indeed, than that of a hard-working man of business, who does not beguile his leisure hours either by the cultivation of art, or literature, or by gathering round him those who shine in the other paths of life.
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