LEGAL APPOINTMENTS.
November 19th.—The death of Jervis made the office of Chief Justice of Common Pleas vacant.[1] According to established (but as I think bad) usage, the Attorney-General, Cockburn, had a right to take the place, and for the last fortnight nothing occupied public attention more than the question whether he would take it or not. He was much averse to take it, but everybody pressed him to accept it, and after much hesitation and consultation he agreed to be Chief Justice, and now it is said he regrets his determination and thinks he has made a mistake. He gives up Parliament, for which he is well adapted, where he acts a conspicuous part, being a capital speaker, and which he likes, and feels that it is his element. He gives up the highest place at the bar, where he is a successful advocate, and makes 15,000l. or 16,000l. a year, and he sees that he shall be obliged to give up in great measure his loose habits and assume more decorous behaviour, which will be a great sacrifice to him, and he becomes a judge with 6,000l. a year for life, not being a good lawyer, and conscious that he will be inferior to his colleagues and to the Puisne Judge in his own court. As soon as he had consented to the promotion a fresh difficulty presented itself as to the office of Solicitor-General, for such is the penury of legal ability at this time that Westminster Hall cannot furnish any men of unquestionable fitness for the office, and the difficulty is increased by the choice being necessarily restricted to men holding the opinions of the present Government, and being able to command a seat in Parliament. They have offered the place to the Recorder, James Wortley, but up to this moment I know not if it has been accepted.[2]
[1] [Right Hon. Sir John Jervis, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, died on November 1, 1856, at the age of fifty-four.]
[2] [Right Hon. James Stuart Wortley, a younger son of Lord Wharncliffe, who then filled the office of Recorder of London, which he surrendered for that of Solicitor-General.]
November 23rd.—After long delay and apparently much hesitation James Wortley has accepted the Solicitor-Generalship. He consulted Gladstone and Sidney Herbert, neither of them very eligible advisers on such a question. Gladstone is said to have replied that he would run a great risk as to his pecuniary interests, but if he could support the foreign policy of the Government, there was no reason why he should not accept. He retains his rank of Privy Councillor, of which I doubt the fitness, as it places him at all events in a very anomalous position, for the law officers are the official advisers of the Privy Council and are often called upon to sit there as assessors. However, the Judges are said to have pronounced an opinion that there is no reason why he should not plead in any of the courts. It is said, and I believe truly, that now Cockburn has taken the irretrievable step he is very sorry for it, and is more struck by the necessary consequences of his promotion than he was at first. He has all his life been a very debauched fellow, but he is clever, good-natured, and of a liberal disposition and much liked by his friends. A story is told of him that he was in the habit of going down on Sundays to Richmond or elsewhere with a woman, and generally with a different one, and the landlady of the inn he went to remembered that Sir A. Cockburn always brought Lady Cockburn with him, but that she never saw any woman who looked so different on different days, and this gave rise to another story. When Lord Campbell went to some such place with Lady Stratheden (who had been raised to the peerage before her husband), the mistress of the house said that Sir A. Cockburn always brought Lady Cockburn with him, but that the Chief Justice brought another lady and not Lady Campbell.
While we have meetings perpetually held and innumerable writings put forth to promote education and raise the moral standard of the people, we are horrified and alarmed day after day by accounts of the most frightful murders, colossal frauds, and crimes of every description. War has ceased, though the Temple of Janus seems only to be ajar; but the world is still in commotion, in alarm, and visited by every sort of calamity, moral and material, in the midst of which it is difficult to discover any signs of the improvement of the human race, even of those portions of it which are supposed to be the most civilised and the most progressive.
A DIPLOMATIC IMBROGLIO.
December 7th.—At Wrotham and at Ossington last week. The news of the day is that we are to have another 'Conference' at Paris, to settle the Bolgrad affair, our Government having given way to what Clarendon told me he certainly would not consent; but we had managed to get matters into such a fix, and it was so necessary to extricate all the several parties from the embarrassed positions in which they were placed by their own or by each other's faults, that no alternative remained. This arrangement, which is not very consistent with Palmerston's recent declarations at Manchester and in London, is proclaimed by the Government papers, and generally understood to be a means of enabling Russia to concede our demands with as little loss of dignity and credit as possible, and to terminate the difference between us and France by our making an apparent concession to France, while she makes a real one to us. Everything has evidently been carefully arranged for the playing out of this diplomatic farce, and Cowley, who is to be our sole representative, is to be accommodating and not quarrelsome; but reste � savoir whether the manœuvres of some of the others may not provoke his temper and bring about angry collisions. Between this matter and the b�vue we have made of our Neapolitan interference, never was there such a deplorable exhibition as our foreign policy displays; but nobody seems to care much about it, and though there will in all probability be a good deal of sparring, and taunts and sneers in Parliament, Palmerston's Government will incur no danger of any adverse vote, for everybody is conscious that in the actual state of parties and the dearth of parliamentary leaders, every man of sufficient ability being disqualified for one reason or another, no man but Palmerston can conduct a Government or command a majority in Parliament; nor does there appear in the distance any man likely to be able to fill his place in the event of his death or his breaking down, events which must be contemplated as not very remote when he is seventy-three years old, although his wonderful constitution and superhuman vigour of mind and body make everybody forget his age and regard the possibility of his demise with the sort of incredulity which made the courtier of Louis XIV. exclaim on the death of that monarch, 'Apr�s la mort du Roi on peut tout croire.'
Great astonishment has been excited by the appointment of a Mr. Bickersteth as Bishop of Ripon, against whom nothing can be said, nor anything for him, except that he is a very Low Churchman. All the vacant sees have now been filled with clergymen of this colour, which is not very fair or prudent, as it will exasperate the moderate High Churchmen and set them strongly against a Government which appears determined to shut the door of ecclesiastical preferment against all but the Lowest Churchmen, and such a policy will most likely have the effect of encouraging the advocates of those extreme measures of an anti-Catholic or a puritanical character which always give so much trouble and embarrassment when they are brought forward in Parliament.