powers, and doing a kindness to an honoured friend, though redoubtable political opponent. With the full concurrence of the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel, and Lord Aberdeen, whom he consulted, Lyndhurst accepted the appointment, the emoluments of which, 7,000l. a year, were of moment to him; and in the four years during which he held it he raised the reputation of his court to the highest point. So sound were his judgments that they were very rarely carried to appeal. The operation of taking notes was so irksome to him that he left the task to his chief clerk. But such was the tenacity of his memory, and his skill in arranging the details of evidence during the progress of the case, that his summings-up were masterpieces of accuracy as well as terseness, helping the jury when mere reading of the evidence in the ordinary way would probably have bewildered them. The most signal instance of his marvellous power of digesting masses of evidence, reducing them into order, and retaining them in his memory, was his judgment in the case of Small v. Attwood. The hearing of the case began 21 Nov. 1831, and occupied twenty-one days in reading the depositions and hearing the arguments of counsel. On 1 Nov. 1832 Lyndhurst delivered a judgment ‘by all accounts,’ says Lord Campbell, ‘the most wonderful ever heard in Westminster Hall. It was entirely oral, and without even referring to any notes, he employed a long day in stating complicated facts, in entering into complex calculations, and in correcting the misrepresentations of counsel on both sides. Never once did he falter or hesitate, and never once was he mistaken in a name, a figure, or a date.’ He had to defend this judgment some years afterwards on an appeal to the House of Lords in a speech which, Lord Campbell says, ‘again astounded all who heard it.’ His judgment was reversed, wrongly, as is now admitted by the soundest lawyers. In the discussions in the House of Lords in 1831 Lyndhurst took a leading part, and his speeches, read by the light of what has since happened, while they prove him to have had the prophetic intuitions of the statesman, are worthy to be read no less for political instruction than for that best eloquence which, having important things to say, says them in the clearest and most emphatic and tersest language. He succeeded (7 May 1832) in carrying a motion for postponing consideration of the clauses for disfranchisement, and, the ministry having resigned, he was at once sent for by William IV, who, upon his advice, authorised him to ascertain the views of the leaders of the opposition as to taking office. The Duke of Wellington was prepared to have done so; Sir Robert Peel, however, was not. Lord Grey resumed office, and the Reform Bill passed without further opposition. Unlike his great rival and friend Brougham, Lyndhurst never rose to speak in the House of Lords unless he felt that his silence might be misconstrued or injure a good cause. He was always eagerly listened to. His speeches were never prepared, except in this, that the subject was thought over and over. ‘With the exception of certain phrases,’ he told the Rev. Whitwell Elwin, ‘which necessarily grow out of the process of thinking, I am obliged to leave the wording of my argument to the moment of delivery.’ But here he seemed to be never at a loss. His mind as he spoke worked with an energy that completely took possession of his hearers. In delivering his judgments also this was eminently conspicuous. He so stated the facts that those who listened saw things with the same clearness as himself, and so were led insensibly up to his own conclusions. He was well described by a writer in 1833: ‘You can hear a pin fall when he is addressing the house; you may imagine yourself listening to—looking at—Cicero. His person, gesture, countenance, and voice are alike dignified, forcible, and persuasive. … He stands steadily, however vehement and impassioned in what he is delivering, never suffering himself to “overstep the modesty of nature,” to be betrayed into ungainly gesticulations.’ On the fall of Lord Melbourne's administration in November 1834, Lyndhurst again became chancellor during the short administration of Sir Robert Peel, which terminated in the following April. Being free from constant work as a judge, he now took a more active part in the discussions of the House of Lords. He led the opposition (1835) in the debates on the Municipal Reform Bill, in the face of a very determined and angry opposition, carrying several important amendments which he believed, and which have been found to be, improvements on the measure as introduced. To the principle of the Irish Municipal Reform Bill (1836) he set up a determined resistance, which was fatal to the measure, and drew down upon him the envenomed attack of the whigs, as well as of O'Connell and others, for having spoken of the Irish as ‘aliens in blood, in language, and in religion,’ a phrase which he proved, when the bill came back with the commons' amendments, that he had never used, demonstrating at the same time, from the language of Irish agitators themselves, that it had been made their boast that their countrymen were what Lyndhurst was accused of having called them. In this session he was the means of
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