he had received a pension of 4000 per annum from an ungrateful country, find he suddenly remembered what Lords Coke and Bacon had said about the debt due from
every successful lawyer.Following in the path struck out by Miss Strickland in her Lives of the Queens of England, and by Lord Brougham s Lives of Eminent Statesmen, he at last pro duced, in 1849, The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of England, from the earliest times till t/ie reign of King George IV., 7 vols. Svo. The conception of this work is magnificent ; its execution wretched. Intended to evolve a history of jurisprudence from the truthful portraits of England s greatest lawyers, it merely exhibits the ill-digested results of desultory learning, without a trace of scientific symmetry or literary taste, without a spark of that divine imaginative sympathy which alone can give flesh and spirit to the dead bones of the past, and without which the present becomes an unintelligible maze of mean and selfish ideas. A charming style, a vivid fancy, exhaustive research, were not to be expected from a hard-worked barrister; but he must certainly be held responsible for the frequent plagiarisms, the still more frequent inaccuracies of detail, the colossal vanity which obtrudes on almost every page, the hasty insinuations against the memory of the great departed who were to him as giants, and the petty sneers which he con descends to print against his own contemporaries, with whom he was living from day to day on terms of apparently sincere friendship. These faults are not so glaring in the lives of such men as Somers and Hardwicke, whom distance in time makes safe from personal jealousy ; they are painfully apparent in the lives of Eldon, Lyndhurst, and Brougham, and they have been pointed out by the biographers of Eldon and by Lord St Leonards.[1] And yet the book is an invaluable repertory of facts, and must endure until it is superseded by something better. It was followed by the Lives of the Chief Justices of England, from the Norman Conquest till the death of Lord Mansfield, 8vo, 2 vols., a book of similar construction but inferior merit.
It must not be supposed that during this period the literary lawyer was silent in the House of Lords. He spoke frequently. The 3d volume of the Protests of the Lords, lately edited by Mr Thorold Rogers, contains no less than ten protests by Campbell, entered in the years 1842-45. He protests against Peel s Income Tax Bill of 1842 ; against the Aberdeen Act (G and 7 Viet. c. 61) as conferring un due power on church courts; against the perpetuation of diocesan courts for probate and administration; against Lord Stanley s absurd bill providing compensation for the destruction of fences to dispossessed Irish tenants; and against the Parliamentary Proceedings Bill, which proposed that all bills, except money bills, having reached a certain stage, or having passed one House, should be continued to next session. The last he opposed because the proper remedy lay in resolutions and orders of the House. He protests in favour of Lord Monteagle s (Mr Spring Rice) motion for inquiry into the sliding scale of corn duties under 5 Viet. c. 14; of Lord Normanby s motion on the Queen s speech in 1834, for inquiry into the state of Ireland (then wholly under military occupation); of Lord Radnor s bill to define the constitutional powers of the home secretary, when Sir James Graham opened Mazzini s letters. In 1844 he records a solitary protest against the judgment of the House of Lords in Reg. v. Millis, which affirmed that a man regularly married according to the rites of the Irish Presbyterian Church, and afterwards regularly married to another woman by an Episcopally ordained clergyman, could not be convicted of bigamy, because the English law required for the validity of a marriage that it should be performed by an ordained priest.
On the resignation of Lord Denman in 1850, Camp bell was appointed Chief Justice of the Queen s Bench. For this post he was well fitted by his knowledge of com mon lav, his habitual attention to the pleadings in court, and his power of clear statement. On the other hand, at Nisi Priiis and on the criminal circuit, he was accused of frequently attempting unduly to influence juries in their estimate of the credibility of evidence. It is also certain that he liked to excite applause in the galleries by some platitude about the " glorious Revolution " or the " Protes tant succession."[2] He assisted in the reforms of special pleading at Westminster, and had a recognized place with Brougham and Lyndhurst in legal discussions in the House of Lords. But he had neither the generous temperament nor the breadth of view which is required in the com position of even a mediocre statesman. In 1859 he was made Lord Chancellor of Great Britain, probably on the understanding that Bethell should succeed as soon as he could be spared from the House of Commons. His short tenure of this office calls for no remark. In the same year he published in the form of a letter to Mr Payne Collier an amusing and extremely inconclusive essay on Shake speare s legal acquirements. One passage will show the conjectural process which runs through the book : " If Shakespeare was really articled to a Stratford attorney, in all probability, during the five years of his clerkship, he visited London several times on his master s business, and he may then have been introduced to the green-room at Blackfriars by one of his countrymen connected with that theatre." The only positive piece of evidence produced is the passage from Thomas Nash s " Epistle to the Gentle men of the Two Universities," prefixed to Greene s Arcadia, 1859, in which he upbraids somebody (not known to be Shakespeare) with having left the "trade of Noverint " and busied himself with " whole Hamlets " and " Landfills of tragical speeches." The knowledge of law shown in the plays is very much what a universal observer must have picked up. Lawyers always underestimate the legal know ledge of an intelligent layman. Campbell died on the 23d June 1861. It has been well said of him in explanation of his success, that he lived eighty years and preserved his digestion unimpaired. He had a hard head, a splendid constitution, tireless industry, a generally judicious temper. He was a learned, though not a scientific lawyer, a faithful political adherent, thoroughly honest as a judge, dutiful and happy as a husband. But there was nothing admirable or heroic in his nature. On no great subject did his principles rise above the commonplace of party, nor had he the magnanimity which excuses rather than aggra vates the faults of others. His life is the triumph of steady determination unaided by a single brilliant or attractive quality.
Scotland, in Argyllshire, situated on an indentation of the coast, near the southern extremity of the peninsula of Kintyre, in 55 25 N. lat. and 5 36 W. long. Its principal buildings are the churches (one of which stands on the site of the castle of the Macdonalds), the town- Louse, tLe jail, and the athenfeum. The staple industry is
the manufacture of whisky. There are in the town, or in- ↑ It was of this book that Sir Charles Wetherell said, referring to its author, " and then there is my noble and biographical friend who has added a new terror to death." See Misrepresentations in Campbell s " Lives of Lyndhurst and Brougham " corrected by St Leonards. Lon- "ion, 1869.
- ↑ This applies particularly to his conduct of the case of G. Achilli r. Dr Newman for libel contained in the Lectures on the Difficulties of Protestantism. See special Report by W. F. Finlason, London,. 1852.
