Whilst Lord Stowell, smarting under the domestic misery of which his foolish marriage with the Dowager Marchioness of Sligo was fruitful, sought comfort and forgetfulness in the cellar of the Middle Temple, Lord Eldon drained magnums of Newcastle port at his own table. Populous with wealthy merchants, and surrounded by an opulent aristocracy, Newcastle had used the advantages given her by a large export trade with Portugal to draw to her cellars such superb port wine as could be found in no other town in the United Kingdom; and to the last the Tory Chancellor used to get his port from the canny capital of Northumbria. Just three weeks before his death, the veteran lawyer, sitting in his easy-chair and recalling his early triumphs, preluded an account of the great leading case, "Akroyd v. Smithson," by saying to his listener, "Come, Farrer, help yourself to a glass of Newcastle port, and help me to a little." But though he asked for a little, the old earl, according to his wont, drank much before he was raised from his chair and led to his sleeping-room. It is on record, and is moreover supported by unexceptionable evidence, that in his extreme old age, whilst he was completely laid upon the shelf, and almost down to the day of his death, which occurred in his eighty-seventh year, Lord Eldon never drank less than three pints of port daily with or after his dinner.
Of eminent lawyers who were steady port-wine drinkers, Baron Platt—the amiable and popular judge who died in 1862, aged seventy-two years—may be regarded as one of the last. Of him it is recorded that in early manhood he was so completely prostrated by severe illness that beholders judged him to be actually dead. Standing over his silent body shortly before the arrival of the undertaker, two of his friends concurred in giving utterance to the sentiment: "Ah, poor dear fellow, we shall never drink a glass of wine with him again;" when, to their momentary alarm and subsequent delight, the dead man interposed with a faint assumption of jocularity, "But you will though, and a good many too, I hope." When the undertaker called he was sent away a genuinely sorrowful man; and the young lawyer, who was 'not dead yet,' lived to old age and good purpose.
[36] In old Sir Herbert's later days it was a mere pleasantry, or bold figure of speech to say that his court had risen, for he used to be lifted from his chair and carried bodily from the chamber of justice by two brawny footmen. Of course, as soon as the judge was about to be elevated by his bearers, the bar rose; and also as a matter of course the bar continued to stand until the strong porters had conveyed their weighty and venerable burden along the platform behind one of the rows of advocates and out of sight. As the trio worked their laborious way along the platform, there seemed to be some danger that they might blunder and fall through one of the windows into the space behind the court; and at a time when Sir Herbert and Dr. —— were at open variance, that waspish advocate had on one occasion the bad taste to keep his seat at the rising of the court, and with characteristic malevolence of expression to say to the footmen, "Mind, my men, and take care of that judge of yours—or, by Jove, you'll pitch him out of the window." It is needless to say that this brutal speech did not raise the speaker in the opinion of the hearers.
CHAPTER XLVII.
LAW AND LITERATURE.
At the present time, when three out of every five journalists attached to our chief London newspapers are Inns-of-Court men; when many of our able and successful advocates are known to ply their pens in organs of periodical literature as regularly as they raise their voices in courts of justice; and when the young Templar, who has borne away the first honors of his university, deems himself the object of a compliment on receiving an invitation to contribute to the columns of a leading review or daily journal—it is difficult to believe that strong men are still amongst us who can remember the days when it was the fashion of the bar to disdain law-students who were suspected of 'writing for hire' and barristers who 'reported for the papers.' Throughout the opening years of the present century, and even much later, it was almost universally held on the circuits and in Westminster Hall, that Inns-of-Court men lowered the dignity of their order by following those literary avocations by which some of the brightest ornaments of the law supported themselves at the outset of their professional careers. Notwithstanding this prejudice, a few wearers of the long robe, daring by nature, or rendered bold by necessity, persisted in 'maintaining a connexion with the press, whilst they sought briefs on the circuit, or waited for clients in their chambers. Such men as Sergeant Spankie and Lord Campbell, as Master Stephen and Mr. Justice Talfourd, were reporters for the press whilst they kept terms; and no sooner had Henry Brougham's eloquence charmed the public, than it was whispered that for years his pen, no less ready than his tongue, had found constant employment in organs of political intelligence.
But though such men were known to exist, they were regarded as the 'black sheep' of the bar by a great majority of their profession. It is not improbable that this prejudice against gownsmen on the press was palliated by circumstances that no longer exist. When political writers were very generally regarded as dangerous members of society, and when conductors of respectable newspapers were harassed with vexatious prosecutions and heavy punishments for acts of trivial inadvertence, or for purely imaginary offences, the average journalist was in many respects inferior to the average journalist working under the present more favorable circumstances. Men of culture, honest purpose, and fine feeling were slow to enrol themselves members of a despised and proscribed fraternity; and in the dearth of educated gentlemen ready to accept literary employment, the task of writing for the public papers too frequently devolved upon very unscrupulous persons, who rendered their calling as odious as themselves. A shackled and persecuted press is always a licentious and venal press; and before legislation endowed English journalism with a certain measure of freedom and security, it was seldom manly and was often corrupt. It is therefore probable that our grandfathers had some show of reason for their dislike of contributors to anonymous literature. At the bar men of unquestionable amiability and enlightenment were often the loudest to express this aversion for their scribbling brethren. It was said that the scribblers were seldom gentlemen in temper; and that they never hesitated to puff themselves in their papers. These considerations so far influenced Mr. Justice Lawrence that, though he was a model of judicial suavity to all other members of the bar, he could never bring himself to be barely civil to advocates known to be 'upon the press.'
At Lincoln's Inn this strong feeling against journalists found vent in a resolution, framed in reference to a particular person, which would have shut out journalists from the Society. It had long been understood that no student could be called to the bar whilst he was acting as a reporter in the gallery of either house; but the new decision of the benchers would have destroyed the ancient connexion of the legal profession and literary calling. Strange to say this illiberal measure was the work of two benchers who, notwithstanding their patrician descent and associations, were vehement asserters of liberal principles. Mr. Clifford—'O.P.' Clifford—was its proposer and Erskine was its seconder. Fortunately the person who was the immediate object of its provisions petitioned the House of Commons upon the subject, and the consequent debate in the Lower House decided the benchers to withdraw from their false position; and since their silent retreat no attempt has been made by any of the four honorable societies to affix an undeserved stigma on the followers of a serviceable art. Upon the whole the literary calling gained much from the discreditable action of Lincoln's Inn; for the speech in which Sheridan covered with derision this attempt to brand parliamentary reporters as unfit to associate with members of the bar, and the address in which Mr. Stephen, with manly reference to his own early experiences, warmly censured the conduct of the society of which he was himself a member, caused many persons to form a new and juster estimate of the working members of the London press. Having alluded to Dr. Johnson and Edmund Burke, who had both acted as parliamentary reporters, Sheridan stated that no less than twenty-three graduates of universities were then engaged as reporters of the proceedings of the house.
The close connexion which for centuries has existed between men of law and men of letters is illustrated on the one hand by a long succession of eminent lawyers who have added to the lustre of professional honors the no less bright distinctions of literary achievements or friendships, and on the other hand by the long line of able writers who either enrolled themselves amongst the students of the law, or resided in the Inns of Court, or cherished with assiduous care the friendly regard of famous judges. Indeed, since the days of Chancellor de Bury, who wrote the 'Philobiblon,' there have been few Chancellors to whom literature is not in some way indebted; and the few Keepers of the Seal who neither cared for letters nor cultivated the society of students, are amongst the judges whose names most Englishmen would gladly erase from the history of their country. Jeffreys and Macclesfield represent the unlettered Chancellors; More and Bacon the lettered. Fortescue's 'De Laudibus' is a book for every reader. To Chancellor Warham, Erasmus—a scholar not given to distribute praise carelessly—dedicated his 'St. Jerom,' with cordial eulogy. Wolsey was a patron of letters. More may be said to have revived, if he did not create, the literary taste of his contemporaries, and to have transplanted the novel to English soil. Equally diligent as a writer and a collector of books, Gardyner spent his happiest moments at his desk, or over the folios of the magnificent library which was destroyed by Wyat's insurgents. Christopher Hatton was a dramatic author. To one person who can describe with any approach to accuracy Edward Hyde's conduct in the Court of Chancery, there are twenty who have studied Clarendon's 'Rebellion.' At the present date Hale's books are better known than his judgments, though his conduct towards the witches of Bury St. Edmunds conferred an unenviable fame on his judicial career. By timely assistance rendered to Burnet, Lord Nottingham did something to atone for his brutality towards Milton, whom, at an earlier period of his career, he had declared worthy of a felon's death, for having been Cromwell's Latin secretary. Lord Keeper North wrote upon 'Music;' and to his brother Roger literature is indebted for the best biographies composed by any writer of his period. In his boyhood Somers was a poet; in his maturer years the friend of poets. The friend of Prior and Gay, Arbuthnot and Pope, Lord Chancellor Harcourt, wrote verses of more than ordinary merit, and alike in periods of official triumph and in times of retirement valued the friendship of men of wit above the many successes of his public career. Lord Chancellor King, author of 'Constitution and Discipline of the Primitive Church,' was John Locke's dutiful nephew and favorite companion. King's immediate successor was extolled by Pope in the lines,