time. Singularly careless of outward show, no chancellor more easily maintained the dignity of his office, none more readily threw off the cares of state, not even Sir Christopher Hatton led the brawls more gaily than he. Intellectual society he shunned, and not unwisely; for he was ill-read, untravelled, and without either knowledge of or taste for the fine arts. Though in his own house he tolerated no politics but his own, he never allowed party spirit to mar the ease and intimacy of his social relations; and an inexhaustible fund of entertaining anecdote made him a most engaging companion. In later life his capacity for port wine was prodigious, and his seasoned brain was rarely in any appreciable degree affected by his potations. He was a most devoted husband, restricting his hospitality, and even discontinuing the levées which his predecessors had held, out of regard to Lady Eldon's wishes; and was an affectionate father and grandfather if somewhat exacting—he hardly forgave his daughter, Lady Elizabeth, for marrying without his consent, and was not satisfied until Lord Encombe had given him a life interest in the Stowell estates. He was also a good landlord, and unostentatiously charitable. ‘Not to make the church political, but to make the state religious,’ he defined as the object of church establishments; he was himself so neglectful of public worship that, with almost equal humour and truth, he was described as a buttress of the church; and though a trick of sermonising, in season and out of season, clave to him throughout life, he turned a deaf ear on the verge of the grave to the spiritual admonitions of Bishop Henry Phillpotts [q. v.]
Except in the disposal of the higher offices, his distribution of patronage was on the whole injudicious, being chiefly determined by the caprice of the royal family or any other influence which might be powerful enough to overcome his habitual indolence; and he was singularly chary of giving the coveted silk gown to members of the bar. Yet he won the affection of all who pleaded before him, from the grave and reverend seniors on the front bench to the young stuff-gownsman opening his first case, by the urbanity with which he treated them. Except by occasional sallies of wit, which, though rarely of a high order, served to vary the monotony of the proceedings, he seldom intervened during argument, but appeared to be wholly absorbed in attention, his inscrutable features giving no indication of the effect produced upon him. At the close of the case he usually reserved judgment, though no one was by nature or training better qualified to arrive at a speedy decision. The material facts of the case he grasped with a celerity almost intuitive, while a memory well stored with precedents, and an understanding of metaphysical acumen and subtlety, readily furnished him with the principles applicable to it. His indecision was due to an extreme scrupulosity, which caused him to review the case in all conceivable aspects long after he had in fact exhausted it, a propensity perhaps aggravated by a sense of his own instinctive precipitancy. Hence his decrees, like his opinions, were overlaid by a multiplicity of fine distinctions, among which the ratio decidendi was not always easy to grasp. They were, however, seldom appealed from, hardly ever reversed; nor, save so far as they have been rendered obsolete by legislative changes, has lapse of time materially impaired their authority. His gravest error, perhaps, was the extent to which he pushed the principle that the court will not protect by injunction works of an immoral, seditious, or irreligious tendency [see {{sc|Byron, George Gordon}, sixth Lord; Lawrence, Sir William; Southey, Robert; and Wolcot, John]. But, on the whole, the jurisdiction by injunction was most judiciously amplified by him; and if he overstrained the law against forestalling and regrating, and took a pedantically narrow view of the curriculum proper for grammar schools, he construed charitable bequests with exemplary liberality, and gave refinement and precision to the rules which govern the administration of estates in chancery and bankruptcy, the equities of mortgagors and mortgagees, and the remedy by specific performance.
The arrears with which he was incessantly reproached, and which occasioned the creation in 1813 of the office of vice-chancellor, the appointment in 1824 of a deputy-speaker of the House of Lords [Gifford, Robert, first Baron Gifford], and the ridiculous chancery commission of the same year, over which Eldon himself presided, were by no means wholly imputable to his dilatoriness. Chancery procedure had never been distinguished by despatch; and in Eldon's time a rapid and sustained increase of litigation combined with the unusually onerous nature of his political duties to render his position one of exceptional difficulty. Never were the judicial duties of the House of Lords more efficiently discharged than while he occupied the woolsack, though sometimes, as in the case of the Queenberry leases (1819), they involved the decision of the most intricate questions of Scottish real-property law. Nor does it fall to every chancellor to sway
