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tion at Winchester and Oxford, whence he proceeded to one of the inns of court. At an early period of his professional life. we find him one of the four common pleaders belonging to the city of London, who purchase their situations, and are commonly called the city-counsel. He was at this time not known beyond the practice of the lordmayor's and sheriff's courts, and had displayed no particular tokens of future eminence.

At this period Sir William Morton was recorder of London. He had quitted the practice of the bar, and confined himself to the duties of that respectable office. He had been brought into parliament by the influence of the duke of Bedford, and was respectable from private fortune as well as public situation. He was now getting old, and applied to the court of aldermen for leave to appoint a deputy to assist him in his official duties. The common-sergeant, the second law-officer in the corporation of London, had an evident claim to such an appointment. Mr Nugent, a most amiable and excellent man, though of no great professional name, now filled that situation. These gentlemen, however, having differed on some points of legal discussion that had been officially proposed to their consideration, such a coolness had taken place between them, that Mr Eyre, who had gained the favour of Sir William Morton, was now proposed by him to be deputy-recorder, and his influence overbearing that of Mr Nugent, obtained the appointment for him.

Mr Eyre was now elevated into importance; and though the recorder may have indulged his splenetic aversion in passing by the commonsergeant on this occasion, it soon appeared that he had nominated an assistant who possessed knowledge and abilities adequate to his station. On the death of his patron in the year 1762, Mr Eyre was elected by the court of aldermen to succeed him. As recorder of London, he now enjoyed an office of great respectability, as well as considerable emolument. It also gave him the distinction of a silk gown in Westminster-hall, and precedency after the sergeant-at-law.

A very

The affair of Wilkes gave the recorder not a little trouble. large majority of the livery espoused every measure that was brought forward in opposition to government, and the corporation itself became at length subject to the predominating influence of Wilkes and his cause. In this state of things, the recorder conducted himself with firmness; but he could only offer his counsel, and passively submit to the voice of the corporation. At length a remonstrance to the throne was proposed and carried in a court of common-council, which contained such opinions, that the recorder peremptorily refused to exercise his official functions on the occasion. He represented it as enforcing doctrines which he should ever oppose, and expressed in language unfit for the sovereign to hear. He, therefore, declined being the organ by which his majesty should receive such an insult. Sir James Hodges, the town-clerk, supplied the place of the recorder on this occasion. The recorder himself was summoned to justify his conduct before the common-council, and his speech on that occasion was not calculated to avert the vote of censure which followed it. At this crisis, such conduct was certain of its reward; and the recorder was, in the year 1772, appointed a baron of his majesty's exchequer. A short time subsequent to his possession of the ermine, on a question proposed to

the twelve judges by the house of lords, Baron Eyre was distinguished by his argument on that occasion. That he conducted himself with honour and ability in his judicial station, appears from his successive advancements. In 1787 he succeeded Sir John Skynner as chief-baron of his own court. On the resignation of Lord Thurlow in 1792, he was appointed first commissioner of the great seal; and on the removal of Lord Loughborough in the succeeding year to the chancery-bench, he succeeded the noble judge as chief-justice of the common pleas.

Wellbore Ellis, Lord Mendip.

BORN A. D. 1714.-died A. D. 1802.

"THIS gentleman," says a contemporary, "is esteemed one of the most steady uniform courtiers in either house of parliament, as there has been scarcely an administration for the last thirty years in this country, in which he has not borne a share, and cheerfully parted with his colleagues the instant they parted with power." The dexterous politician of whom this affirmation was made in the year 1776, was a younger son of the bishop of Meath. From a king's scholarship at Westminster he was elected, in 1732, to Christ church, Oxford. In 1749 he was appointed lord of the admiralty, and in 1763 secretary at On the accession of the Rockingham party he retired from office; but when Lord North became premier, he accepted the vicetreasurership of the navy.

war.

He took an active part in the measures against Wilkes. The zeal he manifested on this occasion provoked Junius to introduce him as the Guy Faux of the plot which he said was hatching against the liberties of the country. The same writer describes him as a contemptible mannikin, unworthy of notice, and constantly sure of disgrace in his place in parliament. The next conspicuous appearance Ellis made, after the affair of the Middlesex election, was his opposition to Grenville's bill "for regulating the trial of controverted elections." After having opposed it vehemently in all the preceding stages, he moved, on the order to take the report into consideration, that the bill be put off for two months. On a division, however, the ministry, "for the first time since their being imbodied into a regular standing corps," says the anonymous writer already quoted, "found themselves in a minority: the numbers being 187 to 125, on the question being put, whether the bill should be engrossed."

Mr Ellis was very active in the same session (1770) in endeavouring to stifle all inquiry into the then state of America: in that, and his opposition to the bill brought in by Mr Herbert for regulating expulsions, he was more successful than in his attempt to defeat Mr Grenville's bill. "His conduct respecting American affairs since the breaking out of the present troubles," says his contemporary, " has been uniform, decisive, and steady. He has always declared himself for the supremacy of parliament, and for receiving no concession short of unconditional submission. He spoke very warmly against the minister's conciliatory proposition of the 20th of February, 1775; and in the course of last session frequently hinted at the supineness of administra

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tion, their indecisive conduct,—their mistaken lenity; and attributed, in a great measure, all the miscarriages that had hitherto happened to a want of firmness, alacrity, and information. To soften this direct charge against the puppets in power, he attributed our disappointments more to wrong information than any thing else, and congratulated the house on the conversion of administration. In fine, he predicted two things that our arms would in the end prove victorious, perhaps without much bloodshed; but whether or not, they would prove victorious: the inevitable consequence of which would be, the obtaining a revenuc towards easing the heavy burdens borne by the people of this country. "Mr Ellis," this writer continues, " as a parliamentary speaker, is certainly very able. He is well-acquainted with men and books, practice and speculation. Long trained to business, and the various details of almost every official board, he speaks on every subject connected with them with perspicuity, confidence, and precision. Few persons, if any in the house, either in or out of administration, can venture to contend with him in this line with any prospect of success. To a sound native understanding, he has united a close and judicious attention to business; the result of which is, that he is one of the best-informed men in the house of commons. His oratory is not shining or brilliant, but his discourses are all regular, correct, and finished. He delivers himself in the language of a gentleman and a scholar, and with an elegance and conciseness equalled by few, and surpassed scarcely by any. He never fails to close his speeches by proving his arguments on the clearest principles of logical deduction, allowing his facts to be true. In fine, he is no less dexterous at demolishing the arguments of his opponents, than in raising and judiciously constructing his own. On the other hand, when hard pressed, he suits himself to his situation; and is as ingenious in evading, palliating, explaining away, and straining precedents, as he is at other times persuasive, logical, and convincing. He then learns to magnify trifles, and trace similitudes where there never existed a likeness. He can promise, because he is not responsible; he can venture to predict, because he does not pretend to inspiration. He may deny, or assert, when the proofs are not within reach. On the whole, though he is one of the ablest speakers administration have to boast of, and much the ablest support they have in the moment of difficulty, yet he has a certain finicalness in his voice and manner, which is no less fatal to his pretensions to the rank of a first-rate energetic orator, than the necessity arising from his political views, emoluments, and pursuits, is often to his arguments, deductions, and abstract definitions." By another writer his oratory has been described "as a stream that flowed so smoothly, and was at the same time so shallow, that it seemed to design to let every pebble it passed over be distinguished." His manners, the same writer describes as so courteous, that "had he been a hermit, he would have bowed to a cock-sparrow."

In 1782 he took the colonial secretaryship at the king's express desire, but soon afterwards again resigned office. He supported the coalition ministry against Pitt until 1793, when he saw it convenient to secede from the opposition. Next year he was raised to the peerage by the title of Mendip. From this period he mixed little in public life. His lordship died without issue on the 2d of February, 1802.

Petty, Marquess of Lansdowne.

BORN A. D. 1737.-DIED A. D. 1805.

THE greater portion of this nobleman's political life was spent in the period we are now treating of, while earl of Shelburne. He had withdrawn from public life for some years previous to the French revolution, and although that crisis drew him from his retirement, and he saw it to be his duty to support the Fox party, yet he took no active lead in any of the measures of the day.

William Fitzmaurice Petty was the elder son of Baron Wycombe. He entered the guards in early life, and served some time abroad as a volunteer under the duke of Brunswick. At the termination of the seven years' war he returned to England, and was appointed aid-decamp to George III. in 1760. In the following year he entered parliament as representative for Chipping-Wycombe; and in the course of the same year took his seat in the house of peers on succeeding to his father's title of earl of Shelburne.

Lord Shelburne strenuously opposed the treaty of peace of 1762: and was rewarded for his exertions by the presidency of the board of trade, and a seat in the privy-council. Soon afterwards, however, he threw up his appointments, and joined himself to Pitt's party.

"We find Lord Shelburne in the cabinet as one of Lord Chatham's secretaries of state, in the spring of 1767, when the American port-duties were devised elsewhere, but publicly supported by a faithless chancellor of the exchequer,' contrary to the sentiments of his colleagues in office This," continues a contemporary of these transactions, "is the prevailing opinion: he is not forthcoming to answer for himself; but as no man who knew him entertains a single doubt of his unbounded ambition, his versatility and want of system, charity obliges, and common sense urges us to suppose, that the duke of Grafton, and the lords Chatham, Shelburne, and Camden, be their faults what they may in other respects, would hardly have consented to a measure which would at once have emptied them of every pretension to public virtue or political value, if they had not been compelled by a power greater or as great as the king himself. Lord Shelburne, therefore, we may presume, pushed on by this sovereign irresistible momentum, gave way; the consequence of which was, that we were presented with that famous law for laying duties on tea, paper, painters' colours, and glass. The administration we have just been speaking of, the blackest and the most destructive this nation ever saw, was in its dissolution no less extraordinary than in its formation. It was no sooner imbodied than its ruin was determined. The noble lord who was at the head of it, lost his senses, as well as his health and popularity. The chancellor of the exchequer, who always hated, envied, and feared him, profited of the glorious opportunity: he sowed, with the most wicked and able malignity, jealousies and animosities, that became impossible to cure or remove. He paid his court alternately in the closet, and to the house of

3

1 Charles Townshend.

Lord Chatham.

Charles Townshend.

Bedford and when he had rendered every man in the cabinet hateful to the public, contemptible at the council-table, and despicable in parliament, he then rendered them hateful and despicable to each other. The last act of his life, more immediately relating to the noble lord who is the subject of this article, will serve as a specimen of the manner those mere ministerial phantoms, as they passed in succession, were treated and dismissed. In the summer of 1767 the views of France upon Corsica became too apparent to be longer permitted with indifference by an English administration. Lord Shelburne, as secretary of state for the southern department, with the approbation of the other members of the cabinet, gave instructions to our minister at the French court to remonstrate against the measure of making a conquest of Corsica. Choiseul-who knew the imbecility of those ministerial shadows that then occupied the several responsible offices of the state-treated the remonstrance with the contempt that was natural. The noble lord' who made it could not endure this, and instantly, without leave or notice at either side of the water, returned to England. What was the consequence? The French ambassador here received the fullest assurances-and from an authority that could not be questioned—that Lord Shelburne acted entirely on his own head. The remonstrance was disclaimed by the other members of administration; his lordship was dismissed, and the very person who remonstrated appointed secretary of

state.

"His lordship from that instant commenced a violent partisan against the measures of the court, and on many occasions has proved a very powerful adversary. He joined the minister in the measure of new inodelling the East India company, and some other matters of less consequence, which has given rise to several reports of his again returning into office, under the present court-system. This, however, can hardly be credited, unless by those who would wish to represent him as one of the most weak, as well as the most unprincipled men that ever appeared upon the public stage.

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His opinions delivered in parliament relative to the unhappy disputes which distract, divide, and indeed threaten the destruction, if not total dissolution, of this once glorious and envied empire, materially correspond, or rather seem to be copied from those avowed by his pairon and confidential friend.5 And here we think it a part of our duty to give the fullest testimony in their favour, and at the same time to submit a short sketch of them to our readers. His lordship has uniformlyat least in his parliamentary speeches on the subject-contended for the supreme dominion of this country over all its members and dependencies, as exercised through that true constitutional medium, the executive power of the state. On this ground he has maintained the prerogative of the sovereign respecting the exclusive unconditional right he has to the ordering and directing the military force of the nation under the dernier control of parliament, and the inherent right of the legislature to enact certain laws that shall be binding on all the members of the empire. This general outline will be more fully understood by the following explanation. His lordship thinks that the sovereign. of Great Britain may send or order his troops to America or Ireland,

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