Commons, which was translated by Mirabeau, published at Paris under the title ‘Règlemens observés dans la Chambre des Communes pour débattre les matières et pour voter,’ 1789, 8vo, and entirely ignored by the deputies. On his return to England he published a sanguine pamphlet, ‘Thoughts on the probable Influence of the French Revolution on Great Britain,’ London, 1790, 8vo; and induced his friend, James Scarlett, afterwards Lord Abinger [q. v.], to complete a translation (begun by himself) of a series of letters by Dumont descriptive of the events of 1789, to which he added a few letters of his own embodying very free criticisms from a republican point of view of English political, legal, and social institutions. The whole appeared under the title ‘Letters containing an Account of the late Revolution in France, and Observations on the Laws, Manners, and Institutions of the English; written during the author's residence at Paris and Versailles in the years 1789 and 1790; translated from the German of Henry Frederic Groenvelt,’ London, 1792, 8vo. His enthusiasm was, however, soon sobered by the course of events, and perhaps by the influence of Bentham and Scarlett; and with the exception of a single copy, which he retained in his own hands, and which, after his death, passed into Scarlett's possession, he caused the entire unsold remainder of the Groenvelt letters to be burned. About the same period his admiration of Rousseau began to decline, though he remained a deist to the end of his life.
Romilly's rise in his profession, slow at first, was then for a time extremely rapid; later on it was retarded by political influences. He went the midland circuit, practising at sessions as well as the assizes, and he also gradually acquired a practice in the court of chancery. At Warwick, on 15 Aug. 1797, he successfully defended a delegate of the London Corresponding Society, John Binns [q. v.], on a prosecution for sedition. Next year he married. On 6 Nov. 1800 he took silk; in 1802 he was one of the recognised leaders of the chancery bar; in 1805 Bishop Barrington gave him the chancellorship of the county palatine of Durham, which he held until 1815. On 12 Feb. 1806 he was sworn in as solicitor-general to the administration of ‘All the Talents,’ and knighted. He took his seat as member for Queenborough on 24 March, and was placed on the committee for the impeachment of Lord Melville [see Dundas, Henry], on whose trial in Westminster Hall he summed up the evidence (10 May) in a speech of much power and pungency. He also examined witnesses before the royal commission of inquiry into the conduct of the Princess of Wales [see Caroline Amelia Elizabeth], and represented the prince in the proceedings relating to the guardianship of Mary Seymour. On the dissolution of 24 Oct. 1806 he was again returned (29 Oct.) for Queenborough. Though his term of office was of the briefest—the government went out on 25 March 1807—Romilly carried in 1806 a material amendment of the law of bankruptcy (stat. 46 Geo. III, c. 135), which he supplemented in the following year by a measure making the freehold property of traders assets for the payment of simple contract debts (stat. 47 Geo. III, c. 74; cf. stat. 49 Geo. III, c. 121). But he failed in his persistent efforts to carry a measure making the same principle apply to the freehold estates of persons not in trade.
On the change of administration in 1807, Romilly delivered a weighty speech on the constitutional question involved in it, viz. the competence of ministers to pledge themselves to the sovereign not to tender him certain advice in any emergency (9 April). At the general election which followed he was returned, 12 May, for Horsham, Sussex; but being unseated on petition, 26 Feb. 1808, he purchased for 3,000l. the representation of Wareham, Dorset, for which he was returned on 20 April. This compliance with a bad but then common practice Romilly justified to himself as, in view of the universal rottenness of the representative system, the best means of securing his own independence, for the sake of which he had twice declined the offer of a seat, once from Lord Lansdowne, and once from the Prince of Wales. Defeated at Bristol in October 1812, he was returned on 21 Dec. for the Duke of Norfolk's borough of Arundel. On 4 July 1818 he was returned for Westminster.
As a law reformer Romilly, though much stimulated by Bentham, drew his original inspiration from Rousseau and Beccaria. His early pamphlets show the direction in which his thoughts were tending, and already in 1807 he began to give serious attention to the problem of the amendment of the criminal law, which then in theory—in practice it was by no means rigorously administered—punished with death a variety of altogether trifling offences. He had taken, however, too exact a measure of the strength and temper of the opposition he was certain to encounter to dream of proposing a comprehensive scheme; and the labours of detail to which he gave himself were out of all proportion to their results. He succeeded in abolishing
