honourable pursuit of the legal profession than by any other. No fewer than seventy British peerages, including two dukedoms, have been founded by successful lawyers. Mansfield and Erskine were, it is true, of noble family; but the latter used to thank God that out of his own family he did not know a lord.[1] The others were, for the most part, the sons of attorneys, grocers, clergymen, merchants, and hardworking members of the middle class. Out of this profession have sprung the peerages of Howard and Cavendish, the first peers of both families having been judges; those of Aylesford, Ellenborough, Guildford, Shaftesbury, Hardwicke, Cardigan, Clarendon, Camden, Ellesmere, Rosslyn; and others nearer our own day, such as Tenterden, Eldon, Brougham, Denman, Truro, Lyndhurst, St. Leonards, Cranworth, Campbell, and Chelmsford.
Lord Lyndhurst's father was a portrait painter, and that of St. Leonards a perfumer and hair-dresser in Burlington Street. Young Edward Sugden was originally an errand-boy in the office of the late Mr. Groom, of Henrietta Street, Cavendish Square, a certificated conveyancer; and it was there that the future Lord Chancellor of Ireland obtained his first notions of law. The origin of the late Lord Tenterden was perhaps the
- ↑ Mansfield owed nothing to his noble relations, who were poor and uninfluential. His success was the legitimate and logical result of the means which he sedulously employed to secure it. When a boy he rode up from Scotland to London on a pony—taking two months to make the journey. After a course of school and college, he entered upon the profession of the law, and he closed a career of patient and ceaseless labour as Lord Chief Justice of England—the functions of which he is universally admitted to have performed with unsurpassed ability, justice, and honour.
