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There was a momentary, a more than momentary, pause and silence, during which Danesdale thought to himself,

"Now, why did I ask that question? I've put my foot in it somehow."

At last Mrs. Conisbrough remarked, blandly, but not cordially,

"Mr. Aglionby's only son displeased him exceedingly many years ago. He married a woman his inferior in every way. Mr. Aglionby quarrelled with him and disinherited him, and some years afterward the son died."

"I see. It must be rather slow for the poor old fellow, I should think. He must often have regretted the loss of the only fellow with whom he could constantly quarrel.

“Oh, I don't think it was his desire to be always quarrelling with any one, poor old man! Of course he felt the misunderstanding."

"Rather a serious misunderstanding, to quarrel irreparably with one's only son, wasn't it?" asked Mr. Danesdale, whose drawl had almost disappeared, and whose eyes, no longer half closed, were regarding Mrs. Conisbrough inquiringly.

"Y-yes," replied the lady, trifling with her teaspoon, and gazing into her cup. "It was a very terrible misun

NEW SERIES.-VOL. XXXIII., No. 4

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Ah, y-yes," said Mr. Danesdale, returning to his drawl and his hesitation. "But an only son's a difficult thing to replace. Being one myself, I speak from mournful experience. father tells me, often, what an unique article 1 am. I'm sure he finds me a great anxiety, just from that very feeling that he couldn't replace me if anything were to happen to me. Will you have some more tea, Miss Conisbrough ?" Judith started as she gave him her half empty cup to put down.

"No, thank you. I'm not thirsty, nor hungry either.

"I should think that lake by Scar Foot must be a glorious place for skating," observed Mr. Danesdale. Does it ever get frozen over?''

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'Oh, yes!" Rhoda exclaimed fervently. It does, and when it is frozen, I could live on it. You can't think what it costs me to come off it at the end of the day. I do hope the next winter will be a hard one, Mr. Danesdale, and then you would see what it is like, all about here. I always say there is no such place as Yoresett and the dale in the world, but Judith and Delphine vow they would rather live in a musty town; and why, do you suppose?"

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THE materials for a Life of Lord Campbell were ample: his daughter, Mrs. Hardcastle, has made an excellent use of them; and the result is a most agreeable and really valuable book. It was in 1842, when he was in his sixtythird year, that he began the autobiography; an age when memory is controlled by judgment, when narrative is commonly weighted by reflection, when a man who has risen to eminence is more disposed to dwell upon the grave and dignified than on the lighter and haply more illustrative passages of his career. It is fortunate, therefore, that, from his first arrival in London to seek his fortune, Lord Campbell kept up a regular correspondence with his father and brother, in which his impressions are set down while they were fresh, and his early struggles, with the alternating hopes and fears, are described in minute detail with never-failing frankness and vivacity. The letters have been preserved, and the most interesting portions of the work are based upon them. Sainte-Beuve has laid down that "it is very useful to begin with the beginning, and, when one has the means, to take the superior or distinguished writer in his native country, in his race. If we were well acquainted physiologically

*"Life and Letters of John, Lord Campbell, Lord Chief Justice, and afterward Lord Chancellor of England, based on his Autobiography, Journals and Correspondence." Edited Edited by his Daughter, the Hon. Mrs. Hardcastle. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1881.

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with the race, the ascendants and ancestors, we should have a clear light on the secret and essential quality of mind." Conceiving this canon of criticism to be equally applicable to the superior or distinguished lawyer, Lord Campbell, not thinking it necessary to remind the world that he was a Scotchman, begins with an account of his ancestors. ternally he claims to be descended from Donald, the fourth son of the Earl of Argyll, who commanded the van of the Scotch army at Flodden, but he confesses to some misgivings, "knowing well from my experience in pedigree trials how easy it is, giving one link, for the claimant to trace himself up to Alfred, Charlemagne, and the Greek emperors." In the maternal line, his mother being a Hallyburton, he can "really and strictly and optimâ fide" deduce his origin from the kings of Scotland.

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Although, he continues, "of gentle blood each parent sprung," yet in his early days he derived no credit or assistance from ancestors or relatives. was born in obscurity, and had to struggle against penury and neglect." This is rather overstating the case, as at the time of his birth, his father, a dignified clergyman (D.D.), was second minister of Cupar, with a stipend exactly double that of Goldsmith's village preacher "passing rich with forty pounds a year," and subsequently became first ininister with a considerable augmentation of income from other sources. His

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mother, too, was considered an heiress, having a fortune of 1500l." He was fortunate in both parents. His father, before taking orders, had been private tutor during many years to the son of Campbell of Carwhin, the heir-presumptive to the Earl of Breadalbane, who took a lively interest in the education of his successor. At this nobleman's table, both in town and country, the elder Campbell was a constant guest.

"It was probably from this intercourse with the best society that my father acquired the polished manners for which he was remarkable. While in London he paid great attention to the correct pronunciation of the English language, and so far succeeded that an

Englishman who had visited Cupar when he

was settled there as minister afterward said to

me, His dialect, compared to that of his parishioners, was like pieces of gold among

copper.

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His mother is described as having received the very best education which Scotland could then afford, and as celebrated for the grace with which she danced the court minuet. He was born at Cupar on the 15th of September, 1779,"in the midst of a tremendous hurricane, memorable for having blown the pirate Paul Jones out of the Firth of Forth.' He was the third child of seven, five daughters and two sons, and, being very sickly, was nursed with much tenderness by his mother, whose favorite he was supposed to be. He was also petted by a nurse, who was not only a firm believer in ghosts, but could hardly think or talk of anything else.

"Notwithstanding the caution she received to abstain from ghost stories in the nursery, she constantly entertained us with them, and she told them with such conviction of their truth and such impressive effect, that I well remember being afraid to look round the room lest a spirit should become visible to us. The consequence has been, that, though theoretically a disbeliever in all supernatural appear

ances since the beginning of the world, except where a miracle was to be worked for the special purposes of Providence, and though in company and in the daytime I laugh at the credulity of others, sometimes, when left all alone about the midnight hour, I cannot help a feeling of eeriness or superstitious dread com ing over me; and if when I am in this state of mind the wainscot cracks or a mouse stirs behind the hangings or the clock strikes twelve, the hair of my head bristles up and I expect some inhabitant of the world unknown to stand before me.

From the same instructress, probably, I was, when a boy, a firm believer in witches."

When about seven he was sent to the grammar-school at Cupar, where he remained three years, and acquired a fair knowledge of Latin, with the exception of quantity, in which his master was deficient.

'However, I flatter myself that I have never been found out in a false quantity, and have thus been more fortunate than Edmund Burke or Sir James Mackintosh. Burke's magnum vectigal is known to all the world. I have been told that Mackintosh, speaking in a debating society on his arrival in London, said, "Non omnis moriar, multaque pars nei Vităbit Libi..

tinam."

On the other hand, he says that he has often felt a great superiority over Englishmen in the grammatical knowledge of their own language, from his having learnt it as a foreign language. It is certainly remarkable how few educated Englishmen, including authors by profession, have made a careful study of English grammar.

School and college alternated in his education instead of college succeeding school. Shortly after completing his eleventh year (November, 1790), he was sent with his elder brother to the University of St. Andrews, where they attended the Greek and Humanity classes till the termination of the session in the May following, when they returned home and went to school as before. His studies were interrupted for some months by a severe illness, and he then returned to the University, of which he continued a member for four years: till, in fact, he had finished the "curriculum" which entitled him to the degree of A.M.; but degrees, it seems, being granted as a matter of course on payment of fees at St. Andrews, were not held in high esteem, and he did not claim the privilege till some years afterward, when he was settled in England,

and it was creditable to add A. M. to his name. He had begun in his third session to practise oratory at a debating club, and recollects gaining applause in a debate on free-trade by an alliterative sentence which he thought very fine

"Somehow or another it became necessary or expedient to denounce the ironmasters who, by combination a short time before, had raised their commodity to an extraordinary price: I described them as a set of men whose hearts were as hard as the metal they manufactured and monopolized.'

He was under fifteen when his university education was regarded as complete and, even from his own modest account of his acquirements, we should say that there was small ground (barring quantity) for the envy he expresses of the foundation of solid learning laid at schools in England. He was intended for the ministry. This was his father's wish, in which he entirely acquiesced. "I was pleased with the thought of becoming, like him, a great popular preacher, and I anticipated that I might one day reach the dignity of Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland." According to the rules of the establishment, no one could be a candidate for orders till, after having finished his philosophy course, he had been four years a student at a divinity college or hall; and in his sixteenth year he was sent to St. Mary's College, St. Andrews, appropriated exclusively to Theology and Hebrew. Here his diligence and general conduct ingratiated him with the Principal, who recommended him as private tutor to read with the only son of Mr. Craigie of Glendoick, a great laird in the Carse of Gowrie, and son of Lord President Craigie, a celebrated Scotch lawyer."

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This was his position in the spring of 1798, when the professors of St. Andrews were requested to recommend a tutor for the son of Mr. Webster, partner in the West India house of Wedderburn and Webster in Leadenhall Street. The appointment was offered to Campbell, who was eager to accept it, but his father hesitated about trusting him, so young and inexperienced, at such a distance from home. "At length he consented; all the terms were arranged, and I bade adieu to the University of St. Andrews, after a residence there of seven years.

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The family in which he was domesticated resided at Clapham Common. Mr. Webster is described as a very good-natured but not very wise man, without much weight or authority in his own household. Madame was mistress in everything. She was young, beautiful, gay, and fond of admiration. His pupil was a boy of nine or ten years of age, who required to be initiated in the first rudiments of Latin. The guests of the Websters were mostly City peo

ple, whose conversation was commonplace enough, but he went frequently to London, where he was kindly received by friends of his father, among others, by Dr. William Thomson, author of some political satires, at whose house he saw a good deal of literary society and was first inflamed by the ambition of be coming an author himself.

He takes the first opportunity of seeing John Kemble and Mrs. Siddons, who exceed any notion he had formed of histrionic excellence, and he is "wretched" until he had been in the House of Commons, in which he finds himself for the first time on the 3d of April, 1798, the day of Wilberforce's motion for the immediate abolition of the slave trade.

"This was the most memorable day of my life. ... Now was the most splendid era in the history of the House of Commons, and this debate was one of the finest ever heard within its walls.

If Peel, the best performer we now have, had then risen to state officially the result of the papers laid upon the table respecting the importation of negroes and the price of colonial produce, he would have done it clearly and he would have been respectfully though coldly

listened to; but if he had attempted such eloquence as I heard from him last session in the peroration to his much-applauded speech on the income tax, he would have been laughed Business talents we at or coughed down. now have, but real fine speaking is gone for

ever.

Lord Campbell would probably have said the same of the finest of Mr. Gladstone's budget speeches, and it is startling to be told that really fine speaking was gone forever in 1842. The following estimate of Pitt's motives must also be received with caution:

"After Henry Thornton and several inferior speakers had shortly addressed the House, uprose Pitt himself, and delivered a most splendid oration in favor of immediate abolition, which he declared was not less imperiously required by the interest and safety

of the West India Islands than by the obligations of morality. No one while listening to his fervid eloquence could then question his sincerity, but there is no longer a doubt that he was insincere, and that he was merely playing the game which he thought the most skilful as minister and leader of a party, to denounce the traffic which he was resolved to uphold. Notwithstanding the strong leaning of the Court and a certain section of the aris

tocracy in its favor, he might have carried the abolition at any hour had he been so inclined, and his hostility was afterward proved to be colorable by his encouraging the employment

of British capital in the importation of slaves into the captured colonies.'

The motion was lost by a majority of four, which, it is suggested, was probably arranged by George Rose, the Secretary to the Treasury, with the view of saving the slave trade and keeping up the hopes of the abolitionists and the credit of the Minister.

ment.

"After hearing this debate, I could no longer have been satisfied with being Moderator of the General Assembly.' However, he continued two years longer with the Websters, doing his utmost for the improvement of his pupil, whom he brought to the point of composing in Latin prose and reading Ovid's "Metamorphoses" with facility and amuseDuring these two years his mode of life, mental progress, and plans for the future, are detailed in letters to his father and brother.* Mrs. Webster had induced her husband to take a house in a fashionable quarter of the town, and not thinking it genteel that her son's tutor should sleep or eat in the house, had caused lodgings to be taken for him with an allowance for his board; not a liberal one, unless he was economizing for a purpose, for in a letter dated Warwick Street, December 16th, 1798, he writes :

...

"MY DEAR BROTHER, . . . My attention is always occupied with some literary pursuit, and I have never felt a moment's ennui since I came to town. I live very economically. I dine at home for a shilling, go to the coffeehouse once a day, fourpence; to the theatre once a week, three-and-sixpence. My pen will keep me in pocket-money. I this day begin a job which I must finish in a fortnight, and for which I am promised two guineas; but, alas! Willie Thomson paymaster! He owes me divers yellowboys already. I go no farther than to write the history of the last

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war in India for him till he pays me all. have given up, foolishly I believe, my engagement with the Oracle,' the office of historian being more noble than that of newspaper critic and translator."

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Like all men of conscious ability and uncertain prospects, he is constantly fluctuating between hope and despondency. In April, 1799, he writes to his father that he shall never get on in Lon

* Afterward Sir George Campbell of Edenwood. He obtained an appointment in the Medical Service of the East India Company, and left England for India in 1800.

don, and that the sooner he comes back to Cupar the better that" one way his foolish fancy had once suggested of rising," but experience had dispelled the illusion, and he finds that he is as little qualified for literature as for everything else.

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'My ambition now is to find some secure retreat, where forgetting and forgotten I may spend the curriculum vitæ calo datum in gloomy I have peace and desperate contentment. some thoughts of setting out in search of such a retreat Where wild Oswego spreads her swamps around; but if you can procure me a living in the Kirk of Scotland, you will save me the trouble of crossing the Atlantic."

Before the end of the year a complete change has come over him, and the spirit of his dream has begun to point to the Woolsack, to be reached through the reporters' gallery. His whole soul is bent on getting his father's consent to his becoming a law-student, and he parries the objection of insufficient means by example upon example of similar difficulties overcome. "You know how poorly off Tom Erskine was while a student. Mr. Pittwas obliged to pawn his chambers in Lincoln's Inn before he was called to the Bar." On December 11th, 1799, he writes:

"As a country minister I should be the most miserable of human beings, and not improbably should at last become completely deranged. As a reporter, and afterward as a lawyer, I shall be obliged to be busy every hour of the day, and shall have no time to indulge in gloomy and distressing reflections. In Scotland I should be nearly cut off from the streams of Helicon; in London I have only to kneel down and drink my fill."

His father reluctantly consents, and his approach to the streams of Helicon is facilitated by Mr. (afterward Serjeant) Spankie, who procured him an engagement with the Morning Chronicle, founded and edited by Mr. Perry,

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who, by his talents, honor, consistency, and gentlemanly manners, had conferred great credit on the newspaper press." His duties were of the most multifarious description.

He was ex

pected to attend public meetings as well as the House of Commons, to translate French newspapers, and to make himself generally useful. In October, 1800, he writes, "though much indisposed I was obliged to go yesterday to the Shakespeare Tavern, where was cele

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