LORD LYNDHURST.
IT would be an instructive subject of speculation, if some 1 one were to take ten or twelve great men, who have reached a very advanced age, and were to compute how much of their reputation is due to simple tenacity of life. The achievements which have made the Duke of Wellington famous for ever were consummated at Waterloo, and he finally- relinquished supreme civil power in 1830; but how would history have estimated his character, had he died at the date of the Reform Bill ? If the testimony of Mr. Kinglake is to be received, the interval between the 3rd and the 5th of December made to Louis Napoleon all the difference between being an object of contempt and terror to Paris ; and what enthusiastic votary of liberty will venture to deny that even in his mind the last ten years have to some extent softened the outlines of the Emperor's guilt ? History, whom the imagination of Burke pictured " with awful eye," sifting un- weariedly the reputations of mankind, in truth nods and winks like some hireling watcher by a sick man's pillow. In fame, as in other things, time and chance happen unto all men. To live, merely to live, is often to erase the memory of faults, to atone for the self-seeking of ambition, to bar a thousand charges which it might be hard to answer substantially. And it is well that it should be so; for it often shows us how much purity and virtue may remain to a mind which has been stained by passion or distorted by fierce desires ; how little possibly a man's actions may manifest the essence of his cha- racter; and that even in awarding glory, earthly judgments are at best but various and vain.
If ever there were a man to whose career reflections such as these would seem applicable, it is the great lawyer and statesman, who, full of years and honours, has this week departed from among us. If Lord Lyndhurst had died in 1818, at the age of forty-five, he would have died obscure. If he had only lived ten years longer, he would have left a name clouded by sinister rumours, and been regarded as a not very capable Chancellor, whose great talents had not saved him from what contemporary writers openly denominated "contempt." A nether twenty years proved him to be one of the greatest of judges, a statesman first of his time for subtlety in design and audacity in action, and who had missed supreme power rather by the accidents of fortune than from any lack of genius or of daring. While the last fifteen years of comparative retirement have so softened the harsher lineaments of his character, have thrown such an unbroken atmosphere of serene regularity around his life, that we now living can only see those early struggles through an obscuring and deceptive mist, and forget the tempests of the mid-day because we have only basked in the mild radiance of the setting sun.
It has been conjectured that Lord Lyndhurst's great intel- lect never, after all, found its fitting field of occupation in the contests of actual life, and that it would have been more congenially employed in the investigation of the deeper problems of mathematical and physical science. But the single devotion to pure truth which science demands was hardly in his character. He loved pleasure — what men call pleasure—in all its forms, and inherited from his father a taste for display, the gratification of which was not one of the rewards which are in the gift of science. Certainly he was far from devoid of generous impulses, but they were less the guides of life than the luxuries of youth and age. Though the son of a royalist who abandoned his country rather than his allegiance, young Copley seems to have been dazzled by the opening glories of the great republic in whose territories he was born, and when the appointment of travelling Bachelor to the University put three years at his disposal, he took his academic honours "in their newest gloss" to be wondered at and admired in America. The guest of Washington became a fellow of Trinity at 25, but seven more years were suffered to elapse before be commenced practice at the bar. Whether this delay was due to the too absorbing claims of science, or of pleasure, or of both, it was not apparently followed by any extraordinary efforts of ambition. For fourteen years his professional success was considered by calm lookers-on to be far below that to which his abilities entitled him. His learning, except in the law of evidence, was not very ready to hand, and was overshadowed by the profounder acquirements of mere lawyers like Lens and Gifford. Up to 1818, if the uniform testimony of writers of both sides in politics is to be believed, his friends did not doubt him to be a Liberal, though probably enough the domestic events of the few years which followed the peace had left him lukewarm to the cause which they had induced so many others to abandon. When he suddenly entered Par- liament for a Government borough, and ran rapidly through the gamut of promotion, till Canning placed him on the wool- sack, his contemporaries did but comment on tho "prudence " of this "change of party, if not of politics." All London was talking in 1829 of his embarrassments and of the splen- dour of his furniture, his plate, and entertainments—foibles which Tory apologists rather ungallantly attributed to Lady Lyndhurst, whose lovely face will justify in the eyes of pos- terity any amount of uxoriousness in her husband. At a time when party spirit ran high this was a life which invited charges of corruption, and charges of corruption were openly made. But it is fair to say that the Chancellor instantly prosecuted his libellers. They made no attempt to substantiate their accusations, and though it is not worth while to repeat forgotten slanders, we will say that the gravest of the imputations was on the face of it extravagant and ab- surd. Still, for some time after the Duke of Wellington became Premier, it cannot be denied that Lord Lyndhurst did not stand very high in the estimation of Englishmen. But it was difficult to taunt a man with tergiversation who had never spoken or written a word on politics till he entered Parliament, or with embarrassments which never came before the public. If he became Cunning's Chancellor only a few weeks after he had spoken violently against Catholic emancipation it was an infidelity in which he was soon to have far more eminent fol- lowers. And, indeed, no one seems to have looked for much consistency from him. What all men saw was that as a lawyer he was subtle, capable, and could do offensive work— as at the Queen's trial—in an inoffensive way ; and they did not in those days expect that political opinion should not sit lightly on a professional man. It was still possible for a barrister, when asked whether he was a Whig or a Tory, to reply that he was a special pleader.
But the fifty-five years which Lord Lyndhurst had lived when he entered the House of Lords were not enough to show the world what this man had in him. He had yet to show that he was as audacious as he was capable, and as fear- less as he was subtle. Ho aimed at the Premiership, and soon obtained paramount power over the mind of George IV. It was thought, we are told, to be on the cards that he might be Prime Minister, to resist the Catholic claims ; but the time was not yet come, and ho followed the Duke. But if ever the Peers felt deeply on any- thing it was the Reform Bill, for it transferred power from their order to the middle classes, and Lord Lynd- hurst seized the opportunity. He led tho opposition. De- serted by the waverers, he still fought on. On the second reading he made that great speech which outshone even that of the Chancellor Brougham, and placed him in the first rank of orators. Beaten in the direct attack, he did but change his tactics, and fell fiercely on the enemy's flank with the famous resolution for postponing the consideration of the die" franchisement clause. In the teeth of an imminent revolution he tried to form a government, and, if Peel would have brooked a superior, might, perhaps, have succeeded. Again, after the abortive Tory attempt of 1834 ho disputed the leadership of the party with Sir Robert. William IV. actually negotiated with him to take office, but the death of that monarch gave the death-blow to these aspirations, and in 1840 he finally submitted to the ascendancy of his rival.
It is well to recall these passages in his life before we attempt to estimate the man who has, during the last fifteen years, played so different a part, and recalling them, it is our duty to pronounce that, during the vigour of his manhood, ho was rather a great party leader than a great statesman. Doubtless, he loved his country ; but he loved power more. Adopting his party as a matter of convenience, he easily shifted his opinions on matters of principle. On the Catholic claims and the Corn Laws he was only like others who had less excuse ; but when King William set him to form a Ministry in 1832, it was stipulated that he should carry through a full measure of reform, and it was not Lord Lynd- hurst who saw the impossibility of the scheme. Yet he never seems to have entertained any of those doubts as to the sound- ness of the old Tory creed which after the Reform Bill para- lyzed Peel, which swayed him during his Premiership, and finally made him what may not unfairly be called a Liberal. Indeed, Lord Lyndhurst knew no more doubt than fear, pro- bably because, at all events till late in life, he thought but little on politics as a science, and fought for his own hand. In the stormy times from '30 to '37, " ho drank delight of battle with his peers," and if he had formed his Ministry, and the British Constitution had broken into fragments over his head, he would not merely have stood fearless amid the ruins, but would, perhaps, hardly have realized the greatness of the destruction which his splendid audacity had wrought. But neither let us forget that the good qualities which have gilded his old age were present and active even while he yet struggled and aspired. If he loved pleasure, and pomp, and power, he was al ways placable, always generous, always free from bitterness and pique. During their hottest political conflicts, Brougham and Lyndhurst were close friends. Not the Whigs, but Lyndhurst, gave Sydney Smith his first canonry, and raised him from the obscurity of a country parsonage. And however fierce had been his struggle for the Premiership, he stood firmly by Peel, even in '46, when fortune raised the cup of revenge to his very lips. Thus the frailties of his nature, like those of Nelson, were redeemed by many beautiful, and noble, and, happily, enduring virtues. He lacked, indeed, that ardent patriotism, pure as ever burned in the heart of man, which has hidden Nelson's faults in a blaze of glory. But God, in His mercy, gave to the statesman length of days, so that when the fires of passion and ambition had died out, the real substratum of his character might become manifest, and his countrymen might learn to know him as ho really was. As a judge he has left a reputation which, perhaps, posterity will scarcely comprehend. In his first Chancellorship his want of familiarity with the principles and practice of equity was painfully apparent, and in 1834 his tenure of the Great Seal was measured by months. Before the five years of Peel's administration his experience as a legal Peer had supplied him with the requisite learning ; but while his great intellect enabled him not only to arrive at a right conclusion, but so to word his decision as to completely satisfy the suitors, he never obtained that mastery over the system of equity which in the eyes of lawyers atoned for the delays of Eldon and the peevish- ness of Cottenham, and has made their judgments a lasting study to the profession. Students of the common law hold him deservedly in greater honour, and his real fame as a judge rests on his decisions during the four years in which be pre- sided over the Exchequer. Yet even here a fatality pursued him. His greatest judgment, that in "Small v. Atwood," was over-ruled; his judicial career was not long enough to enable him, like Mansfield, to impress his mark on our jurisprudence ; and his greatness as a lawyer, like the eloquence of Boling- broke, will be rather a tradition than a possession to our sons. As an orator they will have better means of judging him, for it was the oratory of the intellect and not of the passions. A style, clear, cold, and rigidly abstain- ing from metaphor; an arrangement of topics, simple, lumi- nous, and in which there was absolutely no room for repe- tition; a voice clear, penetrating, but of little flexibility; an attitude, bolt upright, with hardly any movement of the hands or arms ; these are the characteristics of an eloquence which a reader can fully appreciate. He had no mastery over the passions, and made no appeal to the feelings. Sarcasm was his weapon of offence, and pure reasoning his means of per- suasion. In early life, and even in the Commons, his delivery was impaired by excessive volubility. He and Brougham as orators changed places when they reached the Lords just as Chatham and Mansfield had changed places years before. But if his diction was more like that of Demosthenes than the diction of most modern speakers, it is not in words that a speaker's real power resides. Eloquence is in the voice; and if that answers readily to the emotions of a passionate genius, the plainest words—those which most readily seize on the apprehensions of the audience—aro the fittest to excite and govern all the feelings of the human mind. The words of Demosthenes are perfect, but the effect which they produced was not in the words but in the man.
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