such a practitioner as the modern satirist's Mr. Lambsheart, of Chancerylane, to whom, for thirty years, parchment has been daily bread,—that "even Mr. Lambsheart, though a sharp attorney, is," if you but follow him home, “an excellent judge of port wine, and, indeed, in many other respects, a man.' Even Judge Jeffreys, we read, after carrying off and marrying the fair Mary Nesham, in defiance of her kinsfolk and friends, lived thenceforth a life of devoted attachment to her, and was quite uxorious, this wholesale dealer in death warrants, and purveyor extraordinary to the hang man. Michael Angelo Titmarsh pleases himself at Rougetnoirburg in watching one of the gambling conspirators of the roulette-table, disporting himself at the Springs in his private character, drinking down pints of salts like any other sinner, having a homely wife on his arm, and between them a poodle on which they lavished their tenderest affections. "You see these people care for other things besides trumps; and are not always thinking about black and red :-as even ogres are represented, in their histories, as of cruel natures, and licentious appetites, and, to be sure, fond of eating men and women; but yet it appears that their wives often respected them, and they had a sincere liking for their hideous children."+ With mingled admiration and amusement Lord Macaulay lays stress on this dulce domi characteristic of Doctor Johnson, that he, who was generally the haughtiest and most irritable of mankind, and who was but too prompt to resent anything which looked like a slight on the part of a purse-proud bookseller, or of a noble and powerful patron, bore patiently from the mendicants sheltered under his roof, and who, but for his bounty, must have gone to the workhouse, insults more provoking than those for which he had knocked down Osborne and bidden defiance to Chesterfield. We are not to suppose, as Mr. Sala somewhere remarks, that the tiger is always savage and brutal in domestic life; that the hyæna does not laugh good humouredly in the bosom of his family; or that the wolf can't be sociable and benign, towards Mrs. Lupus and the cubs. Lord Cockburn, in his graphic sketches of eminent advocates of his own time and country, avows the difficulty of describing in John Clerk "a person whose conditions in repose and in action, that is, in his private and in his professional life, almost amounted to the possession of two natures." John Clerk had a spirit which, "however serene when torpid," rose into fierceness when chafed, as chafed it was every moment during his practice at the bar: nor was his the common zeal of a counsel, even of Chaffanbrass proportions; it was a passion; he gave the client his temper, his perspiration, his whole body and soul; and he would have been despicable in his own sight had he reasoned without defying and insulting the adversary and the unfavourable judge. For "pugnacity was his line. His whole session was one keen and truceless conflict."§ * Sketches of the English: Debtor and Creditor. †The Kickleburys on the Rhine, p. 60. Biographies, by Lord Macaulay: Samuel Johnson. (1856.) Under his own roof, John was the most amusing of mortals, as he sat in red worsted nightcap, surrounded by pet cats and dogs, pictures and statues, curious screens and grotesque chairs, piles of spectacles and snuffboxes, and "all manner of trash, dead and living, and all in confusion." James Moncrieff, again, frightened people by the harsh, shrill voice which distinguished his pleadings, as well as the stern, determined air, and the compressed lips, which seemed to promise badly for the other side. But "with his private friends he was always cheerful and innocently happy." So again with Sir James Craig, who, "with all his party zeal," was a milky blooded man,"-as no one could doubt who ever saw him with his family. Lord Cockburn says, that seeing him in his fields, or among his villagers, or by his fireside, was one of the sights that show how, in right natures, the kind affections can survive public contention. " Craig's very name suggested the idea of Ephesus and conflict; yet no contented man, wearing his days away in the tranquillity of rural life, could be more amiable." 66 One is reminded of a sketch in Byron's portrait-gallery: There was Parollès, too, the legal bully, He shows more appetite for words than war.† Leigh Hunt's account of his ex-officio persecutor, or official prosecutor, Sir Vicary Gibbs, whose name as Attorney-General was a terror to Liberals" a little, irritable, sharp-featured, bilious-looking man"-is qualified by the confession that he was "very worthy, I believe, in private," and no end of a novel reader at home. Lord Eldon was noted in private for his admirable temper, his gay and lively spirits, and his easy manners; while "in his domestic relations," says a subsequent Chancellor, "he was without a fault; affectionately attached to his family... and for years devoting himself to the care of an invalid wife with an assiduity not often exceeded."§ The same learned and noble lord refers elsewhere to Chatham's exceedingly affectionate disposition and amiable manners at home, in contrast with his overbearing arrogance in another place. The pride bordering upon insolence, in which the Great Commoner showed himself encased to the world, fell naturally from him, we are told, and without any effort to put it off as he crossed the threshold of his own door. "To all his family he was simple, kindly, and gentle."|| In another volume, Lord Brougham remarks of Sir Samuel Romilly that all his severity was reserved for the forum and the senate, when vice was to be lashed, or justice vindicated, the public delinquent exposed, or the national oppressor overawed; while in his family and in society, where it was his delight, and the only reward of his unremitting labours, to unbend, he was amiable, simple, natural, cheerful. And once more, the same biographer records of Grattan, that in the playful hilarity of the companion, his unbroken serenity, his unruffled good nature, it was difficult to recognise the giant of debate, whose "awful energies" were hurled in public upon the Corrys, the Duigenans, and the Floods. So admirers, across the ocean, of the late Rufus Choate, magniloquently assure us that none who had only seen him "dark, mysterious, grand, and self-abstracted as he thundered in the tribune;" or who had only heard him "shaking, and at the same time moulding to his will, the hearts of a jury;" while ever and anon he, the Hon. Rufus, "with lowering brow and weird look of warning," pointed at them "with that terrible index finger, as if threatening them with immediate retribution for a false or even a mistaken verdict"-none who knew the overwhelming Rufus only in those severer hours, could guess how "simple and ticularly unassuming he was in private," "how calm, how gentle, how courteous to all." par The late Sir James Graham's biographer bears record that few men have had more of affectionate respect and devotion than it was that statesman's good fortune to enjoy in the circle of his own fireside. "There all the haughtiness and cynicism of manner which was too frequently complained of by strangers seemed to be utterly forgotten; and those who only saw him in the unreserve of family intercourse have never been able to comprehend how one so lovable and so loved could have become the object of so much dislike with those whose means of observation were but casual and rare.”+ To the same effect is the testimony of Mr. J. C. Colquhoun, who says that while to the world Sir James appeared cold and distant, and in parliamentary debate allowed himself to use harsh words which left rankling recollections, you had but to see him within his family, to learn how tender were his affections, how gentle and forbearing his deportment, how he unbent among his children, and joined in their amusements with a ready sympathy. He might be seen, in his first Administration, "seated in church with his little boy nestling close to his side, with one of his father's hands clasped in both of his, and the picture revealed how warm was the heart of the reserved and distant man." And long years afterwards, when he was Home Secretary, and "the most unpopular man in Sir Robert Peel's Administration, denounced by the organs of the press, and disliked by many in the House of Commons, he might be seen going home tired at midnight after a day of hard and anxious work, and when he found one of his children wakeful from toothache, he took his place by the bedside, as if it was his natural sphere, watched by him, gave him remedies, soothed his fretfulness, sacrificed the sleep he stood in need of, that he might lessen the pains of the suffering child.”‡ Of a previous, and still more unpopular Home Secretary, together with his colleague in the Foreign Office, it is edifying to read Miss Martineau's account of the impressions of Hunt's Radical followers, when brought (1820) into the presence of those whom, says Sir Archibald Alison, § they had been taught to regard as of a cruel and unrelenting disposition. "The simple-minded men," Miss Martineau calls them, "who had followed. Hunt, were surprised, when brought into the presence of the Privy Council, at the actual appearance of the rulers of the land, whom they had regarded as their cruel enemies. They found no cruelty or ferocity in the faces of the tyrants-Lord Castlereagh, the good-looking person * Vandenhoff's Reminiscences, p. 274. † Life and Times of Sir James Graham, by T. M'Cullagh (Torrens, vol. i. p. 138. Letter from J. C. Colquhoun, Esq., Nov., 1862; Torrens, II. 484. in a plum-coloured coat Lord Sidmouth... [with] mild and intelligent eyes; his manners affable, and much more encouraging to freedom of speech than had been expected."* Moore says, in his Journal, that it was indeed a noble thing to see that "high unbending politician," the late Earl Grey-so "proud and aristocratic" in public life" in the bosom of his happy family, playing with the young ones like a schoolfellow, and listening to the music of the elder girls with all the attention and delight of a lover." Nor be forgotten the Journalist's picture of Sir Francis Burdett (in 1818), as "a most amiable man, something particularly attaching in his manner; his gentleness, and almost bashfulness, forming such a contrast to the violence of his public career."‡ One of the most popular of contemporary essayists has devoted an entire essay to the subject of what he calls "Our Doubles," in illustration of this duplicate development of human nature. His Lord de Rougecoffer, for instance, a Secretary of State, is one whose bowels seem to be of red tape, his blood of liquefied sealing-wax, his brains a pulp of mashed blue-books-judging of him, that is, by his parliamentary aspect, which is sufficiently adust and undelightful, if not repellent and forbidding. Yet has this cold incarnation of officialism "a Double who is the delight of the smaller branches of a large family; who can do the doll trick to a nicety, make plum-puddings in his hat, cut an orange into a perfect Chinese puzzle of shapes, and make as excellent a 'back' at leap-frog as any young gentleman from the ages of eight to twelve, inclusive, could desire."-Then, again, we have Mr. John Trett (of the firm of Tare and Trett), ship-broker,-a morose despot in the counting-house, who is the terror of his clerks, and the bugbear of the Jerusalem Coffee-house; but who has a double at Dalston, the merriest, most jovial, chirruping middle-aged gentleman," who has the most attached servants in the world. "He is an excellent father, a liberal master, a jewel of a man at Dalston only beware of him in Copperbottom Court."-To him succeed Messrs. Harrow and Wrench, solicitors, stern and heartless in semblance during office-hours-the one seeming an embodied ghoul, the other a vampire, "with a whole fagot of legal sticks and staves through what ought to be his heart, but is a rule to show cause." But each has his double. Mr. Harrow leaves his inexorable severity at the office; and in Guildford-street "he gives delightful evening-parties, loses his money at cards with charming complacency, and is never proof against petitions for new bonnets from his daughters, for autumn excursions from his wife, for ten-pound notes from his son at Cambridge ;"-while his partner, Mr. Wrench, who more particularly looks after the selling-up and scarifying business, is an active philanthropist in private life, and "quite a 'Man of Ross' among the poor crossing-sweepers"§ in his neighbourhood. Like many men who make a great noise in public, Cobbett, says Leigh Hunt, seems to have been a good, quiet sort of man in private; occasionally blustering a little, perhaps, at his workmen, and more dictatorial to them than he would have liked others to be to himself; but a good husband and father, a pleasant companion; and his family "heartily * Martineau's History of the Thirty Years' Peace, I. 227. † Diary of Thomas Moore, Sept. 12, 1818. Ibid., Sept. 7. § Dutch Pictures: Our Doubles. lamented him when he died; the best of all testimonies to private worth."* For, to cite a maxim of Dr. Maginn's, a man whom his children love can never be contemptible. No one, it is said, can be a hero to his valet de chambre, because the valet sees all the petty physical wants and moral defects of his master. How much more difficult to be the object of esteem and devotion in the eyes of those who have turned their eyes upon us from childhood.† Elsewhere, by the way, Dr. Maginn points out to students of Shakspeare, that the bloody Macbeth is kind and gentle to his wife; that Claudius is fond of his foully-won Gertrude; and that Shylock the Jew is an affectionate father, and a good-natured master. This last instance, of Shylock the Jew, reminds us of a passage to the purpose in one of Mr. Disraeli's Israelitish disquisitions. Obdurate, malignant, odious, and revolting as the low-bred Jew of to-day may appear to us, he is rarely demoralised, Mr. Disraeli contends. And the proof adduced is, that beneath his own roof the heart of the vulgarest Hebrew opens to the influence of his beautiful Arabian traditions, and that the patriarchal feeling lingers about his hearth. "A man, however fallen, who loves his hearth, is not wholly lost."+ What good, honest, generous men at home, exclaims Mr. Emerson,§ will be wolves and foxes on 'Change! Mr. Robert Bell, in his Life of Canning, adopting all and perhaps more than all Canning's own antipathy to Castlereagh, says of the latter politician, that, "like most other men who have earned the unpleasant distinction of being very much disliked in public, Lord Castlereagh was said to have been agreeable and amiable in private. It is a poor compensation-so let it go." The compensation theory is humorously dismissed by Sydney Smith, in the instance of another Tory Minister. Peter Plymley quizzes his brother Abraham, who lives in the country, for spending a great deal of ink about the character of the then prime minister, Mr. Perceval. Grant all that Abraham writes. Peter says he fears Mr. Perceval will ruin Ireland, and pursue a line of policy destructive to the true interest of his country; and then Abraham replies that the minister is faithful to Mrs. Perceval, and kind to the Master Percevals. "Somehow or another," Peter Plymley rejoins, "(if public and private virtues must always be incompatible,) I should prefer that he destroyed the domestic happiness of Wood or Cockell, owed for the veal of the preceding year, whipped his boys, and saved his country."T According to Sir E. Bulwer Lytton, it is a mistake to suppose that fine ladies are not sometimes very fond mothers and affectionate wives. He makes Lady Selina, in "What will He Do with It?" beyond her family circle, trivial, unsympathising, cold-hearted, supercilious by temperament, never kind but through policy, artificial as clockwork. in her own home, to her husband, her children, Lady Selina was a very good sort of woman” -devotedly attached to her lord and master, whom *The Old Court Suburb, ch. x. See Maginn's Shakspeare Papers, ch. vii., on Polonius. Life of Lord George Bentinck, ch. xxiv. Peter Plymley's Letters, No. ii. Life of Canning, p. 324. ** What will He Do with It? book v. ch. ix. "But |