In reading forward this interesting volume, so characteristic of the times, I cannot resist giving the following farther graphic account of the notorious Jefferies, "a brain of feathers and a heart of lead;" noisy in nature, turbulent at first setting out, deserter in difficulties, and full of tricks: "His friendship and conversation lay much among the good fellows and humorists; and his delights were, accordingly, drinking, laughing, singing, kissing, and all the extravagances of the bottle. He had a sort of banterers for the most part near him, as in olden times great men kept fools to make them merry ; and these fellows, low-cunninged and unprincipled, often abusing each other and their betters, were a regale to him. When he was in temper, and matters indifferent came before him, he became the seat better than any other I ever saw in his place. He took a pleasure in mortifying fraudulent attorneys, and would deal forth his severities with a sort of majesty. He had extraordinary natural abilities, but little acquired, beyond what practice in affairs had supplied. He talked fluently and with ability, and with considerable spirit; and his weakness was, that he could not reprehend without scolding in Billingsgate language, such as should not come out of the mouth of any man. But this he called giving o lick with the rough side of his tongue. It was ordinary to hear him say, 'Go! you are a filthy, lousy, nitty rascal.' Scarce a day passed that he did not, when in chancery, give a lecture to some one of this sort, a quarter of an hour long. And they used to say, This is yours; my turn will be to-morrow.' He seemed to lay nothing of his business to heart, nor care what he did or left undone, and spent in the chancery court what time he thought fit to spare. Many times, on days of causes, the company have waited at his house for five hours in the morning, and after eleven he hath come out, inflamed and staring like one distracted: and that visage he put on when he animadverted on such as he took offence at; which made him a real terror to offenders, whom he also terrified with his terrible ugly face and voice, as if the thunder of the Day of Judgment broke over their heads. He loved to insult, and was bold without check; and nothing ever made men tremble like his vocal inflictions." I will give an instance, hoping it will act as a moral upon my readers; admonishing them, whenever they have power to inflict, they may do it with justice and moderation, not knowing what after-events may arise. A city attorney was petitioned against for some abuse, and affidavit was made that when he was told of my lord chancellor, "My Lord Chancellor!" said he; "I made him ;" meaning his being a means of bringing him early into city business. When this affidavit was read, "Well," said the lord chancellor, "then I will lay my maker by the heels ;" and with that conceit one of his old, best friends went to prison. But this which follows was fatal to him. This case was a scrivener at Wapping, brought to hearing for relief against a bottomry bond. The contingency of losing all being showed, the bill was going to be dismissed; but one of the plaintiff's counsel said that he was a strange fellow, and sometimes went to church, sometimes to conventicles, and none could tell what to make of him; and it was thought he was a trimmer. At that the chancellor fired; "And a trimmer !" said he; "I have heard much of that monster, but never saw one. Come forth, Mr. Trimmer; turn you round, and let us see your shape!" and at that rate talked so loud that the poor fellow was ready to drop under him; but at last the bill was aismissed with costs, and he went his way. In the hall one of his friends asked him how he came off. "Came off!" said he; "I am escaped from the terrors of that man's face, which I would scarce undergo again to save my life; and I shall certainly have the frightful appearance always present.as long as I live." "He is so ugly, witty, and so thin, That he's at once the devil, death, and sin." YOUNG. Afterward, when the Prince of Orange came, and all was in confusion, this infamous chancellor, being very obnoxious, disguised himself, in order to go beyond sea. He was in a seaman's garb, and drinking a pot in a cellar at Wapping. This same scrivener came into this cellar after some of his clients, and his eye caught that frightful face, which made him start. The chancellor, seeing himself eyed, feigned a cough, and turned to the wall; but Mr. Trimmer went and gave notice that he was there; whereupon the mob flowed in, and he was in extreme hazard of his life. The lord mayor rescued him and placed him in the Tower for safety, where he died a few days after, leaving ". a name never mentioned but with curses and jeers," as Byron said of Lord Castlereagh. man. Next we have a picture of Sir John Trevor. He was a favourite of Lord Chief Justice Jefferies, and also his countryIt will serve to give a better understanding of this character, to show what sort of man that chief brought forward. "He was bred a sort of clerk in old Arthur Trevor's chamber, an eminent and worthy professor of the Inner Temple. A gentleman that visited Mr. Arthur Trevor, at his going out, observed a strange-looking boy in his clerk's seat, (for no person ever had a worse sort of squint than he had,) and asked who that youth was? A kinsman of mine,' said Trevor, 'that I have allowed to sit here to learn the knavish part of the law.' This John Trevor grew up and took in with the gamesters, among whom he was a great proficient; and, being well-grounded in the law, proved a critic in resolving gambling cases and doubts, and had the reputation and the authority of a judge among them; and his sentence, for the most part, carried the cause. From this exercise he was recommended by Jefferies to be of the king's council, and then Master of the Rolls; and, like a true gamester, he fell to the good work of supplanting his patron and friend, and would have certainly done it if King James's affairs had stood right up much longer; for he was advanced so far with him as to vilify and scold him publicly in Whitehall. He was chosen speaker in King James's parliament, and served in the same post after the restoration. Once upon a scrutiny for bribery in the house of commons, in favour of one Cook, a creature of Sir Josiah Childs, who ruled and regulated the East India Company, it was plainly discovered that the speaker, Trevor, had £1000; upon which the debate run hard upon him, and he sat six hours as prolocutor in an assembly that passed that time with calling him all to naught to his face; and at length he was forced, or yielded, to put the question against himself, as in this form: As many as are of opinion that Sir John Trevor is guilty of corrupt bribery, by receiving,' &c., &c.; and, in declaring the sense of the house, declared himself guilty. The house rose, and he went his way, and came there no more; but he continued in his post of Master of the Rolls, equitable judge of the subjects' interests and estates, to the great encouragement of prudent bribery for ever after." “And all her trumpets to the land complain, The wags of the days used to say of Trevor, that "Justice was blind, but Law only squinted." As this is the age of monstrous queer fellows as judges and lawyers, I will give one more from the same writer. "The Lord Chief Justice Saunders succeeded Pemberton. He was at first no better than a poor beggar boy, if not a parish foundling, without known parents or relations." He might have said: 66 -No mother's care Shielded my infant innocence with prayer; No father's guardian hand my youth maintained, Called forth my virtues, and from vice restrained." SAVAGE. "He found a way to live by obsequiousness, (in Clements Inn, as I remember,) and courting the attorneys' clerks for scraps. The extraordinary observance and diligence of the boy made the society willing to do him good. He appeared very ambitious to learn to write, and one of the attorneys got a board knocked up at a window, on the top of a stair-case, and that was his desk, where he sat and wrote copies after court and other hands the clerks gave him. He made himself so expert a writer that he took in business, and earned some pence by hackney writing; and thus by degrees he pushed his faculties and fell to forms; and, by books that were lent him, became an exquisite entering clerk; and, by the same course of improvement of himself, a very able counsel, first in special pleading, and then at large; and, after he was called to the bar, had practice in the Kings' Bench Court equal with any of them. As to his person, he was very corpulent and beastly, a mere lump of morbid flesh. He used to say, 'by his troggs,' (such a humorous way of talking he affected,)'none could say he wanted issue of his body, for he had nine in his back.' He was a fetid mass, that offended his neighbours at the bar in the sharpest degree. This hateful decay of his carcase came upon him by continual sottishness; for, to say nothing of brandy, he was seldom without a pot of ale at his nose, or near him. That exercise was all he used; the rest of his life was sitting at his desk or piping at home, and that home was a tailor's house, and the man's wife was his nurse, if nothing worse; but by virtue of his money, of which he made little account, though he got a great deal, he soon became master of the family; and, being no changling, he never removed, but was true to his friends, and they to him, to the last hour of his life. His parts were very lively, full of wit and repartee, in an affected rusticity all natural to him. He was ever ready, and never at a loss. He was a near match for the witty Sergeant Mainard. His great dexterity was in the art of special pleading; and he would lay snares that often caught his superiors who were not aware of his traps. He was, indeed, so fond of success for his clients, that, rather than fail, he would set the whole court hard with a trick, for which he sometimes met with a severe reprimand, which he would wittily ward off, so that no one was much offended with him. But Lord Hale could not bear his irregularities of life; and for that, and suspicion of his tricks, used to bear hard upon him in his court. With all this, he had a goodness of nature and disposition in so great a degree that he may be deservedly styled a philanthropist. He was a very Silenus to the boys, (as in this place I may term the students at law,) to make them merry whenever they had a mind to it. He had nothing rigid or austere about him. If any near him grumbled at his stench, he ever converted the complaint into content, and laughing with the abundance of his wit. As to his ordinary dealings, he was as honest as the driven snow was white; and why not, having no regard for money nor desire to be rich? I have seen him for hours and half hours together, before the court sat, stand at the bar, with an audience of students over against him putting cases, and debating so as suited their capacities; and he encouraged their industry. And so in the Temple: he seldom moved without a parcel of youths hanging about him, and he merry, and jesting with them. "It will be readily conceived that this man was never cut out to be a presbyter, or anything that is severe or crabbed. In no time did he lean to faction, but did his business without offence to any. He put off officious talk of government or politics with jests, and so made his wit a catholicon or shield, to cover all his weak places and infirmities. When the court came into the steady course of using law against all kinds of offenders, this man was taken into the king's business, and had the part of drawing and perusal of almost all indictments and informations that were then to be prosecuted, with the pleadings thereon, if any were to be special; and he had the settling of the large pleadings in the quo warranto against London. His lordship (Guildford) had no sort of conversation with him but in the way of business and at the bar; but once, after he was in the king's business, he dined with his lordship, and no more. And there he showed another qualification he had acquired, and that was to play jigs upon a harpischord, having taught himself with the opportunity of an old virginal of his landlady's, but in such a manner (not for defect, but figure) as to see him were a jest. The king, observing him to be of a free disposition-loyal, friendly, and without greediness or guilt-thought of him to be the chief justice of his bench at that nice time, and the ministry could not but approve of it; so great a weight was then at stake, or could not be trusted to men of doubtful principles, or such as anything might tempt to desert them. While he sat in the King's Bench he gave the rule to the general satisfaction of the lawyers. But his course of life was so different from what it had been, his business so incessant and withal so crabbed, and his diet and exercise changed, that the constitution of his body, or head rather, could not sustain it, and he fell into an apoplexy and palsy, which numbed all his parts, and he never recovered the strength of them.”* * From Life of Lord Keeper Guildford. |