Mr. Shepherd's treatise, named at the head of this article, is, we believe, the only book on Election Law on which we have never yet passed an opinion. The reason is, it was originally published before the passing of the Reform Bill, and the present edition is the first in which the provisions of that bill have been incorporated. The work has long been considered one of the very best on the old law, and has evidently furnished many valuable suggestions to subsequent writers. In its present improved state, it constitutes a complete summary of the Law of Elections, including the result of the decisions down to the period of publication; and being written in a clear perspicuous style, with a thorough knowledge of all the bearings of the subject, bids fair to throw all other commentators on the Reform Bill (with the exception of Mr. Rogers) into the shade. M.

ART. II.-LIFE OF LORD CHANCELLOR TALBOT.

THE uneventful life of this accomplished lawyer and most estimable man, scarcely otherwise marked than by the successive steps of his elevation in the profession he adorned, and by his advance in the esteem of all good men, however admirable the example it supplies for the imitation of the legal student, must be admitted to furnish little of incident or amusement to the reader of biography. But our catalogue of distinguished lawyers would be indeed imperfect, if his name were omitted, who perhaps above them all, by a rare union of the highest professional acquirements with the calm and dignified exercise of virtues almost unblemished even by frailty or error, commanded the universal reverence of his country while he lived, and her deep and abiding regret when a premature death removed him from the sphere of his honours and his usefulness. So few, however, are the recorded facts of his life, that our brief sketch will necessarily wear the appearance rather of a panegyric than a biography.

William Talbot, a gentleman of some fortune in Staffordshire, descended from a younger branch of the ancient and

renowned house whose fame some centuries before had resounded throughout Europe, was the father of an only son, William, who entered the church, and through the interest of his kinsman, the well known Charles Talbot, Duke of Shrewsbury, became successively Dean of Worcester, Bishop of Oxford, and Bishop of Salisbury, until, in the year 1722, he settled on the summit of clerical advancement, in the princely dignities of Durham. By his second wife, Catharine, the daughter of a Mr. King, an alderman of London, he had eight sons, and several daughters. Of those who lived to maturity, the eldest was Charles, the subject of this memoir. He was born in the year 1684, his father being then the incumbent of an Oxfordshire living, and having gone through the usual course of preparatory study, and acquired more than the usual substratum of classical knowledge, was entered, in Michaelmas term 1701, a gentleman commoner of Oriel College, Oxford. There also, as well as at school, he distinguished himself by his successful application to the prescribed studies; and having, in right of his rank as the son of a bishop, proceeded to his bachelor's degree at the end of three years' residence, was almost immediately afterwards (November, 1704,) elected to a fellowship of All Souls' College; for which the statutory qualification is to be "bene natus, bene vestitus, et moderate in arte cantandi doctus." His original purpose had been to take orders; and it is said to have been by the earnest advice and request of Lord Chancellor Cowper, and not without some reluctance and apprehension, that this destination was abandoned, and he applied himself to the study of the law. Having however made his final choice of a profession, he at once entered zealously on the acquisition of the knowledge necessary to its successful prosecution; and even during his undergraduateship, legal reading formed a regular head of his studies. He was entered of the Inner Temple on the 28th of June, 1707, and on the 11th of February, 1710-1, was called to the bar by that society. In the same year he vacated his fellowship by marrying Cecil, daughter and heiress of Charles Matthews, esq. of Castle Mynach, in Glamorganshire, and great-granddaughter by the mother's side of the celebrated Welch judge,

David Jenkins, whose zeal and sacrifices in behalf of the royalist cause were so conspicuous in the great rebellion, and who made so gallant a resistance to the despotic tyranny of privilege. From him she inherited, and conveyed to her husband, the estate of Hensol, in the same county, from which he afterwards took the title of his barony. Supported by his talents and assiduity, and aided by the countenance of his patron, and the influence of his illustrious connexions, he advanced rapidly in professional estimation, and grew, after a very few years, (and before he received any legal rank) into leading practice in the equity courts, to which he had from the first devoted himself. His professional industry was, indeed, taxed to support an expense not less unusual than it was, in this instance, unbecoming. The splendid revenues of the see of Durham were insufficient to maintain the profuse and magnificent expenditure of his father, the bishop, even though, to the great injury of his popularity and his usefulness, he increased them considerably by advancing the fines on the renewal of leases held under the see; and his son was compelled, on two several occasions, to apply large sums to the satisfaction of his debts. In the first parliament of George the First's reign, Mr. Talbot had been elected for Tregony, and sat for that borough until 1722; at the general election in that year he was returned for Durham City, his father having just then been advanced to the bishopric. On the death of the Solicitor General, Sir Clement Wearg, in April, 1726, he was appointed to succeed him; and on that occasion, as also at the general election which followed in 1728, he was re-elected for Durham, and retained that seat until his elevation to the woolsack. His parliamentary duties were probably made subordinate to his professional; at all events, hardly a record survives, beyond the testimony of general panegyric, to show that he escaped the common fate of eminent lawyers within the walls of St. Stephen's. Yet he appears early to have attained some standing with his party; since he was selected in 1722 to second the re-election of Sir Spencer Compton to the speakership, the mover being Lord Stanhope, afterwards the celebrated Earl of Chesterfield. We believe there are but one or two other occasions on which he is mentioned in the collections of the Parliamentary History

as a speaker in either house. Nor was the reign of George II., until the occurrence of the disastrous rising of 1745, a period in which the law officers of the crown found occupation, or could acquire distinction, in the conduct of important state prosecutions. Mr. Talbot (he had not received the rank of knighthood with his patent of Solicitor General,) appears in the State Trials only on the occasion of the prosecutions directed by the Gaol Committee of the House of Commons, in 1729, against the keepers of the Fleet and other prisons, for the murder of prisoners in their custody by confinement in cold and pestilential cells: and also on the trials of one Hales for extensive forgeries, in the same year. The great arena of his learning and talents was the Court of Chancery, where himself and the no less eminent Attorney General, Yorke, magis pares quam similes,-divided almost the whole business of the court, and even (if an anecdote we quoted in a former memoir may be credited,) at times stood in the place of the court itself. So extensive a practice, and so acknowledged a reputation, could not fail, independently of his claims as one of the law officers of the government, and of those derived from his high personal estimation and unblemished character, to recommend him as pre-eminently fitted for advancement even to the highest judicial rank. By the contemporary events of the resignation of Lord Chancellor King and the death of Lord Raymond, the two chief prizes of the profession fell at the same time to the disposal of the minister. The general expectation was, that according to the usual routine of

In the year 1736, although then Chancellor, he strongly opposed, in conjunction with Lord Hardwicke, some severe clauses of a bill for the repression of smuggling; but his speech is not reported. The protest of the dissentient peers on that occasion stated, as one of its main grounds of justification, that "as two noble and learned lords, who presided in the two greatest courts in the kingdom, had shown by the strongest arguments that the bill, as it stood, might be dangerous to the liberty of their fellow subjects, they (the lords) could not agree to the passing of it, however expedient or necessary it might be supposed in other respects." Mr. Hallam cites this as a remarkable proof of the rigorous restraints imposed by our fiscal code upon the personal liberty of the subject, which could create such alarm in the "not very susceptible" mind of a regularly bred crown lawyer, and one always disposed to hold very high the authority of government.

2 Lord Raymond died in the Hilary vacation of 1733; Lord King did not resign until the following October; but the chief justiceship was not filled up in the interval, probably in expectation of the latter event.

promotion, the great seal would be transferred to Sir Philip Yorke, and the post of chief justice given to Talbot. But as the duties of the former had withdrawn him more from that exclusive attendance on the courts of equity to which the latter had devoted himself, although both were equally qualified to occupy the bench of the Court of Chancery, yet the Attorney General was more perfectly fitted to discharge the more varied duties belonging to the presidency of a common law court. There was indeed some small difficulty on a subject which lay pretty close to Sir Philip's heart,-the respective incomes of the two offices; but this was satisfactorily obviated by an increase of the salary of chief justice from two to four thousand a year, by the assurance of a peerage, and by the consideration of the much less precarious tenure of the latter post; for Sir Robert Walpole was already exposed to the assaults of an unrelenting and formidable opposition: Yorke, therefore, took his seat in the King's Bench, and entered the House of Peers as Baron Hardwicke; Talbot, with the unanimous assent and applause of the profession, received the Great Seal, and with it the dignity of the peerage, by the title of Lord Talbot, Baron of Hensol. His patent bears date Dec. 5th, 1733. On this elevation he resigned the office of Chancellor of the diocese of Oxford, which had been given him by his father when bishop of that see, with the view of his resigning it in favour of his younger brother Edward, had not the bishop been removed to Salisbury before the latter became qualified for the office. It was on the occasion of Lord Talbot's taking leave of the Society of the Inner Temple as a bencher, upon his advancement to the Chancellorship, that the last of those solemn revels, which were wont of old to grace the halls of the Inns of Court, and whereon the venerable Dugdale dilates with such a grave complacency, was celebrated in the Inner Temple Hall. We cannot refrain from paying our humble tribute to the memory of these departed scenes of "exquisite fooling," by transferring to our pages the narrative of this, the last of them, as we find it specially recorded in the notes to Wynne's Eunomus. Alas! all things are become new:-not even the dignified solemnities which erst accompanied the investiture of the coif, not even the venerable ceremonial of counting, has now escaped the