attended the courts assiduously, taking copious notes which he methodized into reports; and two volumes of them were published by his sons in 1819. In the hall of the Middle temple he made the acquaintance of Dunning, afterwards Lord Ashburton—poor like himself—a connection which proved subsequently useful. Called to the bar in 1756, Kenyon remained for many years poor and obscure. Without business in Westminster hall, he acquired a little as a conveyancer, his Welsh connections giving him some employment. He rode, too, the North Welsh circuit on a little Welsh pony, a present from his father, and attended the assizes at Shrewsbury, and at one or two towns in the Oxford circuit. But all this amounted to so little, that after ten years at the bar, Kenyon, it is said, wished to take holy orders, but surrendered the intention when he found that he could not procure a presentation to the small living of Hanmer, which was the object of his modest ambition. In the meantime his old acquaintance Dunning had prospered at the bar, and was busy and friendly enough to ask Kenyon to "devil" for him. By degrees it oozed out that Dunning's opinions were written by Kenyon, and cases for opinion at low fees poured in upon him. He answered them skilfully and, what was even more acceptable, rapidly. The acquisition of another patron did still more for him. When Thurlow was raised to the woolsack, he employed Hargrave, the editor of Coke upon Littleton, to assist him in the preparation of his judgments by looking into authorities, and so forth. Hargrave, though sound, was slow, and Thurlow invited the aid of Kenyon, who had attracted his notice in court by observations made once or twice as amicus curiæ. The chancellor was delighted with Kenyon's rapidity of work, and took a personal liking to "Taffy," as he called him. It was to Thurlow that he owed his elevation to the chief-justiceship of Chester, a tolerably lucrative post, and which made him a great man in his native country. No orator, no great reasoner, but possessed of an intuitive sagacity which enabled him to seize the essential points of a case, and thoroughly grounded in English law, he had now a very profitable practice at the bar. It is true that he "battled with force, but not with elegance;" and when employed as Erskine's senior in the defence of Lord George Gordon in 1780, he acted chiefly as a foil to his brilliant junior. On the dissolution of parliament in 1780 Thurlow negotiated his protege's return to the house of commons for Hindon in Wiltshire. In the house he spoke seldom, but voted steadily with Lord North. On the formation of the Rockingham ministry Thurlow retained the seals, and procured the appointment of Kenyon as attorney-general. He proved a prompt and reliable adviser of the government, and remained attorney-general in Lord Shelburne's administration, going out with the accession of the coalition ministry, and resuming his functions with the premiership of Mr. Pitt, whose steady supporter he became. In 1784 he was appointed master of the rolls, and was rapid and sound in his decisions. He took an active part in the famous Westminster election, and in the discussion which followed it; receiving as a reward for his anti-Foxite zeal a baronetcy from Mr. Pitt, and the dedication of the Rolliad. The baronetcy did not reconcile him to the jeers and gibes of his political opponents, and thenceforth he contented himself with a silent though steady support of the ministry. In the January of 1788, the government which he had faithfully served appointed him, on the resignation of Lord Mansfield, lord chief-justice of the king's bench, and he was raised to the peerage as Baron Kenyon of Gredington in the county of Flint. As a peer he continued to give a steady support to the government; but he is not remembered as a legislator who introduced any important measure for the amendment of the law, nor did he pay much attention to the judicial business of the house. As lord chief-justice he exhibited several peculiarities which were, to say the least of them, far from attractive. He was irritable and impatient, treating his brother judges with contempt; and while he behaved to some counsel—such as Erskine—with marked tenderness, he was uniformly rude to others—Mr. Law, afterwards Lord Ellenborough, for instance. To the educated he made himself ridiculous by his scraps of Latin, always trite, generally misquoted, and often misapplied. Although he did not, it would seem, refer on the bench, as has been charged against him, to "Julian the apostle," he did once connect the apostate Roman emperor with "Justin Martyr and other apologists." Even the king, whom he lost no opportunity of eulogizing from the bench, is reported to have said to him—"My lord, by all I can hear, it would be well if you would stick to your good law, and leave off your bad Latin." But in the eyes of lawyers these errors and foibles were or have been atoned for by the legal learning, sagacity, and probity displayed by Lord Kenyon in his decisions. To the general public of his time he was endeared by his zeal for legal order and social morality, and his exaggerations and eccentricities were overlooked. It was a small minority who disapproved of the potent denunciations of anything like disaffection, which he delighted in thundering from the bench in the troubled times which succeeded the breaking out of the French revolution. The middle classes respected him for his diatribes against, and severity towards, the fashionable vices of seduction, duelling, and gambling, even if his zeal led him to hold up "forestallers and regraters" to public execration. He died on the 4th of April, 1802, and grief for the death of his eldest son, an amiable and promising young man, is supposed to have hastened his end. Reference has already been made to the racy and interesting biography of him in Lord Campbell's Lives of the Chief-justices.—F. E.
KEPLER, John, a celebrated astronomer, was born at Weil, a small town of Wirtemberg, on the 21st December, 1571. His parents, Henry Kepler and Catherine Guldenmann, though of noble descent were in indigent circumstances. Their son being a seven-months' child was very sickly during his early life; and when he was only five years of age he was placed under the charge of his grandfather at Leonberg, near Stuttgart, in consequence of his father and mother having joined the army in the Netherlands. After a severe attack of the small-pox he was sent to school in 1577; but his father having been obliged to sell his property and keep an inn at Elmendingen, he was taken from school to do the duties of a servant in his father's house. Upon his return to school in 1585 he was seized with a severe illness, and was forbidden all mental application. In 1586 he was admitted into the school at the monastery of Maulbronn, where he was educated at the expense of the duke of Wirtemberg. After having studied a year at the upper classes the pupils went for examination to the university of Tübingen; and when they had obtained the degree of bachelor they were sent back to the school with the title of veterans. When the usual course of study was completed they became resident students, and took the degree of master of arts. In following this course Kepler was seriously interrupted in his studies by family dissensions, and by the recurrence of his former complaint. His father died in a foreign land, to which he had been driven by the misconduct of his wife, and Kepler was left to struggle single-handed with the world. Notwithstanding these calamities he took his degree of master in 1591, holding the second place in the examination. It does not appear how Kepler was occupied, and how he supported himself for two or three years after he graduated at Tübingen. While he was attending the lectures of the celebrated Moestlin, who had distinguished himself by an oration in favour of Copernicus, Kepler became a convert to the opinions of his master, and wrote an essay on the primary motion (the apparent daily motion of the heavenly bodies), in order to prove that it was produced by the diurnal rotation of the earth upon its axis. "While incidentally engaged in these labours," to use his own words, "in the intermission of my theology," he succeeded George Stadt as professor of astronomy at Grätz in 1593 or 1594. In this situation he continued to lecture on astronomy, of which he had very little knowledge; but in 1595, "when he had some intermission of his lectures he brooded with the whole energy of his mind on the subject, inquiring pertinaciously why the number, the size, and the motion of the planetary orbits were not other than they are." He first considered whether one of the orbits might be double, triple, or any other multiple of the other; and finding no evidence of this, he tried it again on the supposition that there was a small invisible planet between Mars and Jupiter, and another between Mercury and Venus, with certain periods of revolution; but even with these assumptions he could find no regular progression in the distances of the planets. He next supposed that the distance of every planet might be "in the residuum of a sine, and its motion as the residuum of the sine of a complement in the same quadrant;" but "after unremitting labour, and an infinite reciprocration of sines and arcs, he was convinced that this theory could not hold." Having "lost the whole summer in these annoying labours, and praying constantly that he might succeed, a trifling accident enabled him, as he thought, to come nearer the truth. In July, 1595, when
