His son Philip was naturally intended to follow his own profession, and about his sixteenth year was sent to learn it in the office of a solicitor of the name of Salkeld, brother of the celebrated sergeant. It was a rather curious circumstance, that of the young men then in Salkeld’s office, there were two future Lord Chancellors, a Master of the Rolls, and a future Lord Chief Baron: Jocelyn, subsequently Chancellor of Ireland; Strange, Master of the Rolls; Parker, Chief of the Exchequer; and Yorke, who was destined to act as high a part in administration as in law.
There are some slight suspicions that young Yorke had been articled to Salkeld, and a clerk to his brother the sergeant. But against these imputations the biographer battles with a desperate fidelity. It is a pity to see so much zeal thrown away; for the Great Chancellor, as he was deservedly called, would not have been an atom the less great if he had been articled to the one brother and clerk to the other. He might have been only the more entitled to praise for the eminence to which he rose. We respect the aristocracy so far as it ought to be respected; but we are not at all inclined to look for the pedigree of talents in the dusty records of a worn-out genealogy, or feel that the slightest degree of additional honour attaches to learning and integrity, by the best blazonry of the Herald’s Office.
The young student must have soon given evidence of his capacity; for Salkeld, a man sagacious in his estimate of his pupils, recommended that he should try the larger branch of the profession, and put his name on the books of the Temple, which was done Nov. 29, 1708. We have then a dissertation on the propriety of keeping Terms by dining in the hall of the Temple. This, too, is so much wisdom thrown away. A good dinner is, under all circumstances, a good thing. It requires as little apology as any conceivable act of human existence. In the hall, the young barrister is at least in the company of gentlemen, which he perhaps would not be, but for that contingency; if he does not learn much law, he at least learns something of life; and if he has a spark of ambition in his frame, it may be blown into a flame by the sight of so many portly Chief Justices, and Lord Chief Barons, with an occasional glimpse of a retired Lord Chancellor, reposing on a sinecure of £5000 a-year.
Another weakness of the biographer is an eloquent effort to prove that a barrister, whose talents raise him to the summit of his profession, is but little the worse for the want of a university education. It would have been quite sufficient to say, that Philip Yorke rose to be the first lawyer of his age, and Lord Chancellor, without having ever set foot within the walls of a college.
Yorke, at the commencement of his career, was fortunate in an introduction through Parker, one of his fellow-students at Salkeld’s, to Lord Macclesfield, Lord Chief Justice, to whose son it is said that he was engaged as law-tutor. The Chief Justice received him at his table, took an evident interest in his progress, and patronised him on every important occasion. Yorke’s manners were as gentle as his intellect was acute; and such a man would naturally be received with favour at the table of a person so high in rank as Lord Macclesfield. But it has never been said that he humiliated himself for that honour; and through life he had a quiet way of gaining his point, of which a curious instance was given in his earliest days.
The wife of Salkeld was a thrifty personage, who, evidently thinking that her husband’s pupils might be employed in other operations than scribbling parchments, occasionally sent him on her messages, and even to execute some of her commissions in Covent Garden Market. Yorke obeyed, but on giving in the account of his expenditure on those occasions, there appeared frequent entries of coach hire, for “celery and turnips from Covent Garden,” a “barrel of oysters from the fishmonger’s,” &c. &c. Salkeld, perceiving this, remarked to his wife on the expensive nature of this “saving,” and Yorke was no longer employed as her conveyancer of celery and turnips.
He had also some pleasantry as well as point, of which an anecdote was told by the late Jeremy Bentham. Powis, one of the judges of the King’s Bench, one day at a lawyers’ dinner expressed to Yorke his “surprise” at his having got into so much business in so short a period. “I conceive,” said the old fool, “that you must have published some book, or be about publishing something; for look, d’ye see? (which seems to have been a favourite phrase of his,) there is scarcely a cause before the court but you are employed in it.” Yorke answered with a smile, “that he had indeed some thoughts of publishing, but that he had yet made no progress in his book. Powis, priding himself on his sagacity, begged to know its nature. He was answered that it was a “Versification of Coke upon Littleton.” The judge begged a specimen, on which Yorke recited—
“He that holdeth his lands in fee
Need neither to quake nor to shiver,
I humbly conceive; for look, do you see,