"The petition expresses apprehensions of 'proscription, persecution, and oppression.' All grounds of such apprehensions, if such there really are, may be safely removed, if the late benefits which the petition admits have not removed them, without endangering the Established Church, or violating the Coronation Oath."

It was greatly to the credit of Lord Kenyon that he went so far in combating the mischievous notions that had been infused into the royal mind; and if the opinion then expressed had been acted upon at the time of the Irish Union, it would have saved a world of woe to the empire.

Lord Kenyon, like all the other judges of his day, highly approved of the severity of the penal code, and would have thought the safety of the state endangered by taking away the capital sentence from forgery, or from stealing to the amount of five shillings in a shop. Yet he was not such a "hanging judge" as some of his colleagues. A barrister once related the following anecdote in a debate in the House of Commons:

"On the Home Circuit, a young woman was tried for stealing to the amount of forty shillings in a dwelling-house. It was her first offence, and was attended with many circumstances of extenuation. The prosecutor came forward, as he said, from a sense of duty; the witnesses very reluctantly gave their evidence; and the jury still more reluctantly their verdict of guilty. The judge passed sentence of death. The unhappy prisoner instantly fell lifeless at the bar. Lord Kenyon, whose sensibility was not impaired by the sad duties of his office, cried out, in great agitation, from the bench, 'I don't mean to hang you! will nobody tell her I don't mean to hang her?' I then felt, as I now feel, that this was passing sentence, not on the prisoner, but on the law."

Lord Kenyon very seldom wrote his judgments. In delivering them his language was sometimes forcible, but arranged without the slightest regard to the rules of composition. In spite of the softening efforts of his reporters in harmonizing his mixed metaphors, we have specimens of his style preserving a great share of its raciness. Thus he fortifies one of his favorite maxims, which Lord Elden says was constantly in his mouth: Amo stare supra antiquas vias-"If an individual can break down any of those safeguards which the constitution has so wisely and so cautiously erected, by poisoning the minds of the jury at a time when they are called upon to decide, he will stab the administra

1 Edward Morris, Esq., afterwards a Master in Chancery.
2 Twiss's Life of Lord Eldon.

tion of justice in its most vital parts." But some of the stories circulated respecting his historical allusions and quotations must have been exaggerations or pure inventions. Thus Coleridge, in his Table Talk, relates that Lord Kenyon, in addressing the jury in a blasphemy case, after pointing out several early Christians who had adorned the Gospel, added: "Above all, gentlemen, need I name to you the Emperor Julian, who was so celebrated for the practice of every Christian virtue that he was called JULIAN THE APOSTLE?" So in the collection of legal anecdotes, entitled Westminster Hall, the noble and learned lord is represented as concluding an elaborate address, on dismissing a grand jury, with the following valediction: "Having thus, discharged your consciences, gentlemen, you may retire to your homes in peace, with the delightful consciousness of having performed your duties well, and may lay your heads upon your pillows, saying to yourselves, 'Aut Cæsar aut nullus.'" In exposing the falsehood of a witness, he is supposed to have said, "The allegation is as far from truth as old Booterium from the Northern Main'—a line I have heard or met with God knows wheer" (his mode of pronouncing where).1

เ

Before parting with Lord Kenyon's public character, I ought to mention that although he never returned to poetry after his early flight during his apprenticeship, he left reports of cases begun by him while a student, and these being edited and published by his relation, Mr. Job Hammer, inscribe his name in the list of "noble and royal authors," but I cannot say that they were of much value to the profession, or that they confer great glory upon his order.

I have enlivened former Lives of Chancellors and Chief Justices by their facetiæ-but I know nothing of this sort, either by books or tradition, attributed to Lord Kenyon, except his address to Mr. Abbott (afterwards Speaker and Lord Colchester). This pompous little man, while holding under him the office of Clerk of the Rules, was proceeding, as chairman of a committee of the House of Commons, to examine him very minutely upon the delicate subject of the perquisites of the Chief Justice. The offended Judge having demurred to answer any further, and being reminded in a solemn manner of the authority of the House of Commons, at last broke out, "Sir, tell the House of Commons that I will not be yelped at by my own turnspit." Of his other recorded sayings I can find nothing more pointed than that in complimenting Serjeant Shepherd, he said, "He has no rubbish in his head"—that a flippant observation being made by a wit

1 Townsend, vol. i. p. 91.

ness respecting a letter supposed to come from a young lady, he said, "Turn the minion out of court"-and that when he detected the trick of an attorney to delay a trial, he said, "This is the last hair in the tail of procrastination, and it must be plucked out."

When not engaged in his judicial duties, Lord Kenyon led the life of a recluse. He occupied a large, gloomy house in Lincoln's Inn Fields, in which I have seen merry doings when it was afterwards transferred to the Verulam Club. I have often heard this traditional description of the mansion in his time—“All the year through, it is LENT in the kitchen, and PASSION WEEK in the parlour." Some one having mentioned, that although the fire was very dull in the kitchen grate, the spits were always bright"It is quite irrelevant," said Jekyll, "to talk about the spits, for nothing TURNS upon them." Although there was probably a good deal of exaggeration in these jests, there can be no doubt that Lord Kenyon deserved censure for the meanness of his mode of living, and his disregard of decent hospitality. The State conferred the liberal emoluments of Chief Justice upon him as a trustee so far as that he should support the dignity of his station-that he should bring together at his board the deserving members of the important profession over which he was appointed to preside—and that he should represent the country to illustrious foreigners who came to study our judicial institutions. Lord Kenyon's dinner-parties consisted of himself, Lady Kenyon, his children, and now and then an old attorney; and the very moderate weekly bills for such a ménage being paid (which they were most punctually), the accumulations were vested in the three per cents. till they were sufficient to buy another Welsh farm. Lord Kenyon's hours would not well have suited fashionable company; for, rising at six in the morning, he and all his household were in bed by ten at night. He is said to have built a comfortable house at Gredington, to which he retired in the long vacation. Under the name of villa, he had a miserable tumbledown farm-house at the Marsh Gate, about half a mile on this side of Richmond, which is still pointed out as a proof of his economy. The walls are mouldering, and by way of an ornamental piece of water may be seen near the door a muddy duckpond. In Lord Kenyon's time it was guarded by a half-starved Welsh terrier, which was elevated into a higher order of the canine race when the following lines were applied to the establishment::

To this place the family came regularly on Saturday evenings, after a slight repast in town, bringing with them a shoulder and sometimes a leg of mutton, which served them for their Sunday dinner. On Monday morning the Chief Justice was up with the lark, and back in Lincoln's Inn Fields before the lazy Londoners were stirring. We have the following amusing account of one of these journeys from a barrister who was patronized by him :"An old coach came rumbling along and overtook me on the road to London from Richmond. It was one of those vehicles that reminded me of a Duke or Marquis under the old régime of France, rivalling in indigence and want the faded finery of his wardrobe. Its coronet was scarcely discoverable, and its gildings were mouldy; yet it seemed tenacious of what little remained of its dignity, and unwilling to subside into a mere hackney coach. I believe I might have looked rather wistfully at it (I was then a poor barrister, briefless and speechless, in the back rows of the court), when I perceived a head with a red nightcap suddenly pop out from the window, and heard myself addressed by name, with the offer of a cast to London. It was Lord Kenyon. He made the journey quite delightful by charming anecdotes of the bar in his own time-of Jack Lee, Wallace, Bower, Mingay, Howorth, the last of whom was drowned, he said, on a Sunday water-excursion in the Thames. The good old man was evidently affected by the regrets which his name awakened, and they seemed the more poignant because his friend was called to his account in an act of profanation. But it was the sin of a good man,' he observed, and Sunday was the only day a lawyer in full business could spare for his recreation.'"1

The red nightcap had been worn to save his wig. He was curiously economical about the adornment of his head. It was observed for a number of years before he died, that he had two hats and two wigs-of the hats and the wigs one was dreadfully old and shabby, the other comparatively spruce. He always carried into Court with him the very old hat and the comparatively spruce wig, or the very old wig and the comparatively spruce hat. On the days of the very old hat and the comparatively spruce wig he shoved his hat under the bench, and displayed his wig; but on the days of the very old wig and the comparatively spruce hat, he always continued covered. I have a very lively recollection of having often seen him sitting with his hat over his wig; but I was not then aware of the Rule of Court by which he was governed on this point."

1 Clubs of London.

2 Till the middle of the last century the Chancellor is always represented with his hat on. In early times it was round and conical; and such was Lord Keeper

The rest of Lord Kenyon's apparel was in perfect keeping with his coiffure. "On entering Guildhall," says Espinasse, "Pope's lines in the Dunciad came across me, and I quoted them involuntarily:

'Known by the band and suit which Settle wore,
His only suit for twice three years and more.'

"Erskine would declare that he remembered the great-coat at least a dozen years, and Erskine did not exaggerate the claims of the coat to antiquity. When I last saw the learned Lord, he had been Chief Justice for nearly fourteen years; and his coat seemed coeval with his appointment to the office. It must have been originally black, but time had mellowed it down to the appearance of a sober green, which was what Erskine meant by his allusion to its color. I have seen him sit at Guildhall in the month of July in a pair of black leather breeches; and the exhibition of shoes frequently soled afforded equal proof of the attention which he paid to economy in every article of his dress."

In winter he seems to have indulged in warmer garments; for James Smith, author of the "Rejected Addresses," describing him in Michaelmas term, says: "But we should not have his dress complete were we to omit the black velvet smalls worn for many years, and threadbare by constant friction, which he used to rub with most painful assiduity when catechizing the witness. The pocket-handkerchief found in the second-hand silk waistcoat which he bought from Lord Stormont's valet being worn out, he would not go to the expense of another, and, using his fingers instead, he wiped them upon his middle garment, whether of leather or of velvet."

According to other accounts this change in his habits did not begin till the imposition of the Income Tax by Mr. Pitt. Said Rogers the poet, "Lord Ellenborough had infinite wit. When the Income Tax was imposed, he stated that Lord Kenyon (who was not very nice in his habits) intended, in consequence of it, to lay down his pocket handkerchief."

If we can believe his immediate successor, who had a fair character for veracity, Lord Kenyon studied economy even in the hatchment put up over his house in Lincoln's Inn Fields after his death. The motto was certainly found to be "MORS JANUA VITA"-this being at first supposed to be the mistake of the

Williams's, although he was a bishop. In Anne's reign three-cornered hats came up. The black cap of the common law judges, which has remained unchanged for many ages, is square. With this they used always to be covered; but they wear it now only when passing sentence of death.

Table Talk of Samuel Rogers, p. 196.