A Book About Lawyers Part 21

"Say by what name the hapless bard May best attract your kind regard-- Plain Jack?--Sir John?--or Eldon?

Give from your ample store of giving, A starving priest some little living-- The world will cry out 'Well done.'

"In vain, without a patron's aid, I've prayed and preached, and preached and prayed-- _Applauded_ but _ill-fed_.

Such vain _eclat_ let others share; Alas, I cannot feed on air-- I ask not _praise_, but _bread_."

Satisfactorily hoaxed by the rhymer, the Chancellor went to Pimlico in search of the clerical poetaster, and found him not.

Prettier and less comic is the story of Miss Bridge's morning call upon Lord Eldon. The Chancellor was sitting in his study over a table of papers when a young and lovely girl--slightly rustic in her attire, slightly embarra.s.sed by the novelty of her position, but thoroughly in command of her wits--entered the room, and walked up to the lawyer's chair. "My dear," said the Chancellor, rising and bowing with old-world courtesy, "who _are_ you?" "Lord Eldon," answered the blus.h.i.+ng maiden, "I am Bessie Bridge of Weobly, the daughter of the Vicar of Weobly, and papa has sent me to remind you of a promise which you made him when I was a little baby, and you were a guest in his house on the occasion of your first election as member of Parliament for Weobly." "A promise, my dear young lady?" interposed the Chancellor, trying to recall how he had pledged himself. "Yea, Lord Eldon, a promise. You were standing over my cradle when papa said to you, 'Mr. Scott, promise me that if ever you are Lord Chancellor, when my little girl is a poor clergyman's wife, you will give her husband a living;' and you answered, 'Mr. Bridge, my promise is not worth half-a-crown, but I give it to you, wis.h.i.+ng it were worth more.'" Enthusiastically the Chancellor exclaimed, "You are quite right. I admit the obligation. I remember all about it;" and, then, after a pause, archly surveying the damsel, whose graces were the reverse of matronly, he added, "But surely the time for keeping my promise has not yet arrived? You cannot be any one's wife at present?"

For a few seconds Bessie hesitated for an answer, and then, with a blush and a ripple of silver laughter she replied, "No, but I do so wish to be _somebody's_ wife. I am engaged to a young clergyman; and there's a living in Herefords.h.i.+re near my old home that has recently fallen vacant, and if you'll give it to Alfred, why then, Lord Eldon, we shall marry before the end of the year." Is there need to say that the Chancellor forthwith summoned his Secretary, that the secretary forthwith made out the presentation to Bessie's lover, and that having given the Chancellor a kiss of grat.i.tude, Bessie made good speed back to Herefords.h.i.+re, hugging the precious doc.u.ment the whole way home?

A bad but eager sportsman, Lord Eldon used to blaze away at his partridges and pheasants with such uniform want of success that Lord Stowell had truth as well as humor on his side when he observed, "My brother has done much execution this shooting season; with his gun he has _killed a great deal of time_." Having ineffectually discharged two barrels at a covey of partridges, the Chancellor was slowly walking to the gate of one of his Encome turnip-fields when a stranger of clerical garb and aspect hailed him from a distance, asking, "Where is Lord Eldon?" Not anxious to declare himself to the witness of his ludicrously bad shot, the Chancellor answered evasively, and with scant courtesy, "Not far off." Displeased with the tone of this curt reply, the clergyman rejoined, "I wish you'd use your tongue to better purpose than you do your gun, and tell me civily where I can find the Chancellor."

"Well," responded the sportsman, when he had slowly approached his questioner, "here you see the Chancellor--I am Lord Eldon." It was an untoward introduction to the Chancellor for the strange clergyman who had traveled from the North of Lancas.h.i.+re to ask for the presentation to a vacant living. Partly out of humorous compa.s.sion for the applicant who had offered rudeness, if not insult to the person whom he was most anxious to propitiate; partly because on inquiry he ascertained the respectability of the applicant; and partly because he wished to seal by kindness the lips of a man who could report on the authority of his own eyes that the best lawyer was also the worst shot in all England, Eldon gave the pet.i.tioner the desired preferment. "But now," the old Chancellor used to add in conclusion, whenever he told the story, "see the ingrat.i.tude of mankind. It was not long before a large present of game reached me, with a letter from my new-made rector, purporting that he had sent it to me, because _from what he had seen of my shooting he_ supposed I must be badly off for game. Think of turning upon me in this way, and wounding me in my tenderest point."

Amongst Eldon's humorous answers to applications for preferment should be remembered his letter to Dr. Fisher of the Charterhouse: on one side of a sheet of paper, "Dear Fisher, I cannot, to-day, give you the preferment for which you ask.--I remain your sincere friend, ELDON.--_Turn over_;" and on the other side, "I gave it to you yesterday." This note reminds us of Erskine's reply to Sir John Sinclair's solicitation for a subscription to the testimonial which Sir John invited the nation to present to himself. On the one side of a sheet of paper it ran, "My dear Sir John, I am certain there are few in this kingdom who set a higher value on your services than myself, and I have the honor to subscribe," and on the other side it concluded, "myself your obedient faithful servant, ERSKINE."

[35] Swithin was tutor to Ethelwulf and Alfred. Becket was tutor to Henry II.'s eldest son. Wolsey--who took delight in discharging scholastic functions from the days when he birched schoolboys at Magdalen College, Oxford, till the time when in the plenitude of his grandeur he framed regulations for Dean Colet's school of St. Paul's and wrote an introduction to a Latin Grammar for the use of children--acted as educational director to the Princess Mary, and superintended the studies of Henry VIII.'s natural son, the Earl of Richmond. Amongst pedagogue-chancellors, by license of fancy, may be included the Earl of Clarendon, whose enemies used to charge him with 'playing the schoolmaster to his king,' and in their desire to bring him into disfavor at court used to announce his approach to Charles II. by saying, "Here comes your schoolmaster."

PART IX.

AT HOME: IN COURT: AND IN SOCIETY.

CHAPTER XLV.

LAWYERS AT THEIR OWN TABLES.

A long list, indeed, might be made of abstemious lawyers; but their temperance is almost invariably mentioned by biographers as matter for regret and apology, and is even made an occasion for reproach in cases where it has not been palliated by habits of munificent hospitality. In the catalogue of Chancellor Warham's virtues and laudable usages, Erasmus takes care to mention that the primate was accustomed to entertain his friends, to the number of two hundred at a time: and when the man of letters notices the archbishop's moderation with respect to wines and dishes--a moderation that caused his grace to eschew suppers, and never to sit more than an hour at dinner--he does not omit to observe that though the great man "made it a rule to abstain entirely from supper, yet if his friends were a.s.sembled at that meal he would sit down along with them and promote their conviviality."

Splendid in all things, Wolsey astounded envious n.o.bles by the magnificence of his banquets, and the lavish expenses of his kitchens, wherein his master-cooks wore raiment of richest materials--the _chef_ of his private kitchen daily arraying himself in a damask-satin or velvet, and wearing on his neck a chain of gold. Of a far other kind were the tastes of Wolsey's successor, who, in the warmest suns.h.i.+ne of his power, preferred a quiet dinner with Erasmus to the pompous display of state banquets, and who wore a gleeful light in his countenance when, after his fall, he called his children and grandchildren about him, and said: "I have been brought up at Oxford, at an Inn of Chancery, at Lincoln's Inn, and in the King's Court--from the lowest degree to the highest, and yet have I in yearly revenues at this present, little left me above a hundred pounds by the year; so that now, if we wish to live together, you must be content to be contributaries together. But my counsel is that we fall not to the lowest fare first; we will not, therefore, descend to Oxford fare, nor to the fare of New Inn, but we will begin with Lincoln's Inn diet, where many right wors.h.i.+pful men of great account and good years do live full well; which if we find ourselves the first year not able to maintain, then will we in the next year come down to Oxford fare, where many great, learned, and ancient fathers and doctors are continually conversant; which if our purses stretch not to maintain neither, then may we after, with bag and wallet, go a-begging together, hoping that for pity some good folks will give us their charity and at every man's door to sing a _Salve Regina_, whereby we shall keep company and be merry together."

Students recalling the social life of England should bear in mind the hours kept by our ancestors in the fourteenth and two following centuries. Under the Plantagenets n.o.blemen used to sup at five P.M., and dine somewhere about the breakfast hour of Mayfair in a modern London season. Gradually hours became later; but under the Tudors the ordinary dinner hour for gentlepeople was somewhere about eleven A.M., and their usual time for supping was between five P.M. and six P.M., tradesmen, merchants and farmers dining and supping at later hours than their social superiors. "With us," says Hall the chronicler, "the n.o.bility, gentry, and students, do ordinarily go to dinner at eleven before noon, and to supper at five, or between five and six, at afternoon. The merchants dine and sup seldom before twelve at noon and six at night.

The husbandmen also dine at high noon as they call it, and sup at seven or eight; but out of term in our universities the scholars dine at ten."

Thus whilst the idlers of society made haste to eat and drink, the workers postponed the pleasures of the table until they had made a good morning's work. In the days of morning dinners and afternoon suppers, the law-courts used to be at the height of their daily business at an hour when Templars of the present generation have seldom risen from bed.

Chancellors were accustomed to commence their daily sittings in Westminster at seven A.M. in summer, and at eight A.M. in winter months.

Lord Keeper Williams, who endeavored to atone for want of law by extraordinarily a.s.siduous attention to the duties of his office, used indeed to open his winter sittings by candlelight between six and seven o'clock.

Many were the costly banquets of which successive Chancellors invited the n.o.bility, the judges, and the bar, to partake at old York House; but of all the holders of the Great Seal who exercised pompous hospitality in that picturesque palace, Francis Bacon was the most liberal, gracious, and delightful entertainer. Where is the student of English history who has not often endeavored to imagine the scene when Ben Jonson sat amongst the honored guests of

"England's high Chancellor, the destin'd heir, In his soft cradle, to his father's chair,"

and little prescient of the coming storm, spoke of his host as one

"Whose even thread the Fates spin round and full, Out of their choicest and their whitest wool."

Even at the present day lawyers have reason to be grateful to Bacon for the prompt.i.tude with which, on taking possession of the Marble Chair, he revived the ancient usages of earlier holders of the seal, and set an example of courteous hospitality to the bar, which no subsequent Chancellor has been able to disregard without loss of respect and _prestige_. Though a short attack of gout qualified the new pleasure of his elevation--an attack attributed by the sufferer to his removal "from a field air to a Thames air," _i.e._, from Gray's Inn to the south side of the Strand--Lord Keeper Bacon lost no time in summoning the judges and most eminent barristers to his table; and though the gravity of his indisposition, or the dignity of his office, forbade him to join in the feast, he sat and spoke pleasantly with them when the dishes had been removed. "Yesterday," he wrote to Buckingham, "which was my weary day, I bid all the judges to dinner, which was not used to be, and entertained them in a private withdrawing chamber with the learned counsel. When the feast was past I came amongst them and sat me down at the end of the table, and prayed them to think I was one of them, and but a foreman."

Nor let us, whilst recalling Bacon's bounteous hospitalities, fail in justice to his great rival, Sir Edward c.o.ke---who, though he usually held himself aloof from frivolous amus.e.m.e.nts, and cared but little for expensive repasts, would with a liberal hand place lordly dishes before lordly guests; and of whom it is recorded in the 'Apophthegmes,' that when any great visitor dropped in upon him for pot-luck without notice he was wont to say, "Sir, since you sent me no notice of your coming, you must dine with me; but if I had known of it in due time I would have dined with you."

From such great men as Lord Nottingham and Lord Guildford, who successively kept high state in Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, to fat _puisnes_ occupying snug houses in close proximity to the Inns of Court, and lower downwards to leaders of the bar and juniors sleeping as well as working in chambers, the Restoration lawyers were conspicuous promoters of the hilarity which was one of the most prominent and least offensive characteristics of Charles II.'s London. Lord Nottingham's sumptuous hospitalities were the more creditable, because he voluntarily relinquished his claim to 4000 per annum, which the royal bounty had a.s.signed him as a fund to be expended in official entertainments.

Similar praise cannot be awarded to Lord Guildford; but justice compels the admission that, notwithstanding his love of money, he maintained the _prestige_ of his place, so far as a hospitable table and profuse domestic expenditure could support it.

Contrasting strongly with the lawyers of this period, who copied in miniature the impressive state of Clarendon's princely establishments, were the jovial, catch-singing, three-bottle lawyers--who preferred drunkenness to pomp; an oaken table, surrounded by jolly fellows, to ante-rooms crowded with obsequious courtiers; a hunting song with a brave chorus to the less stormy diversion of polite conversation. Of these free-living lawyers, George Jeffreys was a conspicuous leader. Not averse to display, and not incapable of s.h.i.+ning in refined society, this notorious man loved good cheer and jolly companions beyond all other sources of excitement; and during his tenure of the seals, he was never more happy than when he was presiding over a company of sharp-witted men-about-town whom he had invited to indulge in wild talk and choice wine at his mansion that overlooked the lawns, the water, and the trees of St. James's Park. On such occasions his lords.h.i.+p's most valued boon companion was Mountfort, the comedian, whom he had taken from the stage and made a permanent officer of the Duke Street household. Whether the actor was required to discharge any graver functions in the Chancellor's establishment is unknown; but we have Sir John Reresby's testimony that the clever mimic and brilliant libertine was employed to amuse his lords.h.i.+p's guests by ridiculing the personal and mental peculiarities of the judges and most eminent barristers. "I dined," records Sir John, "with the Lord Chancellor, where the Lord Mayor of London was a guest, and some other gentlemen. His lords.h.i.+p having, according to custom, drunk deep at dinner, called for one Mountfort, a gentleman of his, who had been a comedian, an excellent mimic; and to divert the company, as he was pleased to term it, he made him plead before him in a feigned cause, during which he aped the judges, and all the great lawyers of the age, in tone of voice and in action and gesture of body, to the very great ridicule, not only of the lawyers, but of the law itself, which to me did not seem altogether prudent in a man in his lofty station in the law; diverting it certainly was, but prudent in the Lord Chancellor I shall never think it." The fun of Mountfort's imitations was often heightened by the presence of the persons whom they held up to derision--some of whom would see and express natural displeasure at the affront; whilst others, quite unconscious of their own peculiarities, joined loudly in the laughter that was directed against themselves.

As pet buffoon of the tories about town, Mountfort was followed, at a considerable distance of time, by Estcourt--an actor who united wit and fine humor with irresistible powers of mimicry; and who contrived to acquire the respect and affectionate regard of many of those famous Whigs whom it was alike his pleasure and his business to render ridiculous. In the _Spectator_ Steele paid him a tribute of cordial admiration; and Cibber, noticing the marvellous fidelity of his imitations, has recorded, "This man was so amazing and extraordinary a mimic, that no man or woman, from the coquette to the privy counsellor, ever moved or spoke before him, but he could carry their voice, look, mien, and motion instantly into another company. I have heard him make long harangues, and form various arguments, even in the manner of thinking of an eminent pleader at the bar, with every the least article and singularity of his utterance so perfectly imitated, that he was the very _alter ipse_, scarce to be distinguished from the original."

With the exception of Kenyon and Eldon, and one or two less conspicuous instances of judicial penuriousness, the judges of the Georgian period were hospitable entertainers. Chief Justice Lee, who died in 1754, gained credit for an adequate knowledge of law by the sumptuousness and frequency of the dinners with which he regaled his brothers of the bench and learned counsellors. Chief Justice Mansfield's habitual temperance and comparative indifference to the pleasures of the table did not cause him to be neglectful of hospitable duties. Notwithstanding the cold formality of Lord Hardwicke's entertainments, and the charges of n.i.g.g.ardliness preferred against Lady Hardwicke's domestic system by Opposition satirists, Philip Yorke used to entertain the chiefs of his profession with pomp, if not with affability. Thurlow entertained a somewhat too limited circle of friends with English fare and a superabundance of choice port in Great Ormond Street. Throughout his public career, Alexander Wedderburn was a lavish and delightful host, amply atoning in the opinion of frivolous society for his political falsity by the excellence and number of his grand dinners. On entering the place of Solicitor-General, he spent 8000 on a service of plate; and as Lord Loughborough he gratified the bar and dazzled the fas.h.i.+onable world by hospitality alike sumptuous and brilliant.

Several of the Georgian lawyers had strong predilections for particular dishes or articles of diet. Thurlow was very fanciful about his fruit; and in his later years he would give way to ludicrous irritability, if inferior grapes or faulty peaches were placed before him. At Brighton, in his declining years, the ex-Chancellor's indignation at a dish of defective wall-fruit was so lively that--to the inexpressible astonishment of Horne Tooke and other guests--he caused the whole of a very fine dessert to be thrown out of the window upon the Marine Parade.

Baron Graham's weakness was for oysters, eaten as a preparatory whet to the appet.i.te before dinner; and it is recorded of him that on a certain occasion, when he had been indulging in this favorite pre-prandial exercise, he observed with pleasant humor--"Oysters taken before dinner are said to sharpen the appet.i.te; but I have just consumed half-a-barrel of fine natives--and speaking honestly, I am bound to say that I don't feel quite as hungry as when I began." Thomas Manners b.u.t.ton's peculiar _penchant_ was for salads; and in a moment of impulsive kindness he gave Lady Morgan the recipe for his favorite salad--a compound of rare merit and mysterious properties. Bitterly did the old lawyer repent his unwise munificence when he read 'O'Donnell.' Warmly displeased with the political sentiments of the novel, he ordered it to be burnt in the servants' hall, and exclaimed, peevishly, to Lady Manners, "I wish I had not given her the secret of my salad." In no culinary product did Lord Ellenborough find greater delight than lobster-sauce; and he gave expression to his high regard for that soothing and delicate compound when he decided that persons engaged in lobster-fishery were exempt from legal liability to impressment. "Then is not," inquired his lords.h.i.+p, with solemn pathos, "the lobster-fishery a fishery, and a most important fishery, of this kingdom, though carried on in shallow water? The framers of the law well knew that the produce of the deep sea, without the produce of the shallow water, would be of comparatively small value, and intended that turbot, when placed upon our tables, should be flanked by good lobster-sauce." Eldon's singular pa.s.sion for fried 'liver and bacon' was amongst his most notorious and least pleasant peculiarities.

Even the Prince Regent condescended to humor this remarkable taste by ordering a dish of liver and bacon to be placed on the table when the Chancellor dined with him at Brighton. Sir John Leach, Master of the Rolls, was however less ready to pander to a depraved appet.i.te. Lord Eldon said, "It will give me great pleasure to dine with you, and since you are good enough to ask me to order a dish that shall test your new _chef's_ powers--I wish you'd tell your Frenchman to fry some liver and bacon for me." "Are you laughing at me or my cook?" asked Sir John Leach, stiffly, thinking that the Chancellor was bent on ridiculing his luxurious mode of living. "At neither," answered Eldon, with equal simplicity and truth; "I was only ordering the dish which I enjoy beyond all other dishes."

Although Eldon's penuriousness was grossly exaggerated by his detractors, it cannot be questioned that either through indolence, or love of money, or some other kind of selfishness, he was very neglectful of his hospitable duties to the bench and the bar. "Verily he is working off the arrears of the Lord Chancellor," said Romilly, when Sir Thomas Plummer, the Master of the Rolls, gave a succession of dinners to the bar; and such a remark would not have escaped the lips of the decorous and amiable Romilly had not circ.u.mstances fully justified it.

Still it is unquestionable that Eldon's Cabinet dinners were suitably expensive; and that he never grudged his choicest port to the old attorneys and subordinate placemen who were his obsequious companions towards the close of his career. For the charges of sordid parsimony so frequently preferred against Kenyon it is to be feared there were better grounds. Under the steadily strengthening spell of avarice he ceased to invite even old friends to his table; and it was rumored that in course of time his domestic servants complained with reason that they were required to consume the same fare as their master deemed sufficient for himself. "In Lord Kenyon's house," a wit exclaimed, "all the year through it is Lent in the kitchen, and Pa.s.sion Week in the Parlor."

Another caustic quidnunc remarked, "In his lords.h.i.+p's kitchen the fire is dull, but the spits are always bright;" whereupon Jekyll interposed with an a.s.sumption of testiness, "Spits! in the name of common sense I order you not to talk about _his_ spits, for nothing turns upon them."

Very different was the temper of Erskine, who spent money faster than Kenyon saved it, and who died in indigence after holding the Great Seal of England, and making for many years a finer income at the bar than any of his contemporaries not enjoying crown patronage. Many are the bright pictures preserved to us of his hospitality to politicians and lawyers, wits, and people of fas.h.i.+on; but none of the scenes is more characteristic than the dinner described by Sir Samuel Romilly, when that good man met at Erskine's Hampstead villa the chiefs of the opposition and Mr. Pinkney, the American Minister. "Among the light, trifling topics of conversation after dinner," says Sir Samuel Romilly, "it may be worth while to mention one, as it strongly characterizes Lord Erskine. He has always expressed and felt a strong sympathy with animals. He has talked for years of a bill he was to bring into parliament to prevent cruelty towards them. He has always had some favorite animals to whom he has been much attached, and of whom all his acquaintance have a number of anecdotes to relate; a favorite dog which he used to bring, when he was at the bar, to all his consultations; another favorite dog, which, at the time when he was Lord Chancellor, he himself rescued in the street from some boys who were about to kill it under the pretence of its being mad; a favorite goose, which followed him wherever he walked about his grounds; a favorite macaw, and other dumb favorites without number. He told us now that he had got two favorite leeches. He had been blooded by them last autumn when he had been taken dangerously ill at Portsmouth; they had saved his life, and he had brought them with him to town, had ever since kept them in a gla.s.s, had himself every day given them fresh water, and had formed a friends.h.i.+p for them. He said he was sure they both knew him and were grateful to him. He had given them different names, 'Home' and 'Cline'

(the names of two celebrated surgeons), their dispositions being quite different. After a good deal of conversation about them, he went himself, brought them out of his library, and placed them in their gla.s.s upon the table. It is impossible, however, without the vivacity, the tones, the details, and the gestures of Lord Erskine, to give an adequate idea of this singular scene." Amongst the listeners to Erskine, whilst he spoke eloquently and with fervor of the virtues of his two leeches, were the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Grenville, Lord Grey, Lord Holland, Lord Ellenborough, Lord Lauderdale, Lord Henry Petty, and Thomas Grenville.

CHAPTER XLVI.

WINE.

From the time when Francis Bacon attributed a sharp attack of gout to his removal from Gray's Inn Fields to the river side, to a time not many years distant when Sir Herbert Jenner Fust[36] used to be brought into his court in Doctors' Commons and placed in the judicial seat by two liveried porters, lawyers were not remarkable for abstinence from the pleasures to which our ancestors were indebted for the joint-fixing, picturesque gout that has already become an affair of the past.

Throughout the long period that lies between Charles II.'s restoration and George III.'s death, an English judge without a symptom of gout was so exceptional a character that people talked of him as an interesting social curiosity. The Merry Monarch made Clarendon's bedroom his council-chamber when the Chancellor was confined to his couch by _podagra_. Lord Nottingham was so disabled by gout, and what the old physicians were pleased to call a 'perversity of the humors,' that his duties in the House of Lords were often discharged by Francis North, then Chief Justice of the Common Pleas; and though he persevered in attending to the business of his court, a man of less resolution would have altogether succ.u.mbed to the agony of his disease and the burden of his infirmities. "I have known him," says Roger North, "sit to hear pet.i.tions in great pain, and say that his servants had let him out, though he was fitter for his chamber." Prudence saved Lord Guildford from excessive intemperance; but he lived with a freedom that would be remarkable in the present age. Chief Justice Saunders was a confirmed sot, taking nips of brandy with his breakfast, and seldom appearing in public "without a pot of ale at his nose or near him." Sir Robert Wright was notoriously addicted to wine; and George Jeffreys drank, as he swore, like a trooper. "My lord," said King Charles, in a significant tone, when he gave Jeffreys the _blood-stone_ ring, "as it is a hot summer, and you are going the circuit, I desire you will not drink too much."

Amongst the reeling judges of the Restoration, however, there moved one venerable lawyer, who, in an age when moralists hesitated to call drunkenness a vice, was remarkable for sobriety. In his youth, whilst he was indulging with natural ardor in youthful pleasures, Chief Justice Hale was so struck with horror at seeing an intimate friend drop senseless, and apparently lifeless, at a student's drinking-bout, that he made a sudden but enduring resolution to conquer his ebrious propensities, and withdraw himself from the dangerous allurements of unG.o.dly company. Falling upon his knees he prayed the Almighty to rescue his friend from the jaws of death, and also to strengthen him to keep his newly-formed resolution. He rose an altered man. But in an age when the barbarous usage of toast-drinking was in full force, he felt that he could not be an habitually sober man if he mingled in society, and obeyed a rule which required the man of delicate and excitable nerves to drink as much, b.u.mper for b.u.mper, as the man whose sluggish system could receive a quart of spirits at a sitting and yet scarcely experience a change of sensation. At that time it was customary with prudent men to protect themselves against a pernicious and tyrannous custom, by taking a vow to abstain from toast-drinking, or even from drinking wine at all, for a certain stated period. Readers do not need to be reminded how often young Pepys was under a vow not to drink; and the device by which the jovial admiralty clerk strengthened an infirm will and defended himself against temptation was frequently employed by right-minded young men of his date. In some cases, instead of _vowing_ not to drink, they _bound_ themselves not to drink within a certain period; two persons, that is to say, agreeing that they would abstain from wine and spirits for a certain period, and each _binding_ himself in case he broke the compact to pay over a certain sum of money to his partner in the bond. Young Hale saw that to effect a complete reformation of his life it was needful for him to abjure the practice of drinking healths. He therefore vowed _never again_ to drink a health; and he kept his vow. Never again did he brim his b.u.mper and drain it at the command of a toast-master, although his abstinence exposed him to much annoyance; and in his old age he thus urged his grandchildren to follow his example--"I will not have you begin or pledge any health, for it is become one of the greatest artifices of drinking, and occasions of quarrelling in the kingdom. If you pledge one health you oblige yourself to pledge another, and a third, and so onwards; and if you pledge as many as will be drunk, you must be debauched and drunk. If they will needs know the reason of your refusal, it is a fair answer, 'that your grandfather that brought you up, from whom, under G.o.d, you have the estate you enjoy or expect, left this in command with you, that you should never begin or pledge a health.'"

Jeffrey's _protege_, John Trevor, liked good wine himself, but emulated the virtuous Hale in the pains which he took to place the treacherous drink beyond the reach of others--whenever they showed a desire to drink it at his expense. After his expulsion from the House of Commons, Sir John Trevor was sitting alone over a choice bottle of claret, when his needy kinsman, Roderic Lloyd, was announced. "You rascal," exclaimed the Master of the Rolls, springing to his feet, and attacking his footman with furious language, "you have brought my cousin, Roderic Lloyd, Esquire, Prothonotary of North Wales, Marshal to Baron Price, up my back stairs. You scoundrel, hear ye, I order you to take him this instant down my _back stairs_, and bring him up my _front stairs_." Sir John made such a point of showing his visitor this mark of respect, that the young barrister was forced to descend and enter the room by the state staircase; but he saw no reason to think himself honored by his cousin's punctilious courtesy, when on entering the room a second time he looked in vain for the claret bottle.

On another occasion Sir John Trevor's official residence afforded shelter to the same poor relation when the latter was in great mental trouble. "Roderic," saith the chronicler, "was returning rather elevated from his club one night, and ran against the pump in Chancery Lane.

Conceiving somebody had struck him, he drew and made a lunge at the pump. The sword entered the spout, and the pump, being crazy, fell down. Roderic concluded he had killed his man, left, his sword in the pump, and retreated to his old friend's house at the Rolls. There he was concealed by the servants for the night. In the morning his Honor, having heard the story, came himself to deliver him from his consternation and confinement in the coal-hole."

Amongst the eighteenth century lawyers there was considerable difference of taste and opinion on questions relating to the use and abuse of wine.

Though he never, or very seldom, exceeded the limits of sobriety, Somers enjoyed a bottle in congenial society; and though wine never betrayed him into reckless hilarity, it gave gentleness and comity to his habitually severe countenance and solemn deportment--if reliance may be placed on Swift's couplet--

"By force of wine even Scarborough is brave, Hall grows more pert, and Somers not so grave."

A familiar quotation that alludes to Murray's early intercourse with the wits warrants an inference that in opening manhood he preferred champagne to every other wine; but as Lord Mansfield he steadily adhered to claret, though fas.h.i.+on had taken into favor the fuller wine stigmatized as poison by John Home's famous epigram--