DEATH AND CHARACTER OF LORD TENTERDEN. 235 



well-digested arrangement of principles, fortified by the decision of 

 the courts, and written in a perspicuous, brief, and elegant style. 



Lord Tenterden was of the middle height, with nothing striking 

 in his features or expression. He had an even temper, strict morals, 

 and severe and unbending integrity. His conversation was, like his 

 mind, rather solid than brilliant : he was more inclined to keep on the 

 respondent than on the advancing side of an argument, in which he 

 was acute, and instantly saw a weak part. He was prudent and eco- 

 nomical in every transaction of life. No man had more ballast in his 

 mind : he had no ostentation, no vanity ; and was not in the smallest 

 degree inebriated by his high station. His Latin and even English 

 compositions prove that he did not want fancy ; but he was rather a 

 severe and exact critic. He had not much mercy for the wildness 

 and irregularity of modern literature. Like Dr. Johnson, he always 

 exercised his reason rather than his imagination ; and never allowed 

 himself to wander much in the fields of romance. His friendships 

 were not lightly taken up, nor ever abandoned, unless for some insu- 

 perable cause : when once fixed they were generous, warm, pure, 

 and benevolent. As, from the age of twenty-six, he steadily pursued 

 the most laborious of all professions, so he had no time to mix much 

 in general society, or relax himself by any of the pleasures of the 

 world. He, therefore, retained somewhat of the manners of the 

 scholar and the lawyer, which do not make that conversational dis- 

 play, or exhibit those artifices of amusing triteness, seizing upon light 

 circumstances, just touching them and then flying away, like a bee 

 extracting honey from flowers, for which they, who study only to 

 please, acquire such skill. His mind was occupied with great things, 

 and they who do great things well, seldom do little things gracefully. 

 It was among his high virtues that he abstained from taking a poli- 

 tical part : as a judge it added to the unshaken confidence in his in- 

 tegrity, and stern regard to the pure and strict law. He had political 

 opinions : they were those of the moderate Tories, in which he had 

 been always brought up, and from which he never swerved. He had 

 been reared under the patronage and shadow of the church : he had 

 looked from his earliest infancy on the mighty structure of its magnifi- 

 cient metropolitan cathedral; he had been taught, as a child, to venerate 

 its ancient and noble institutions : thence he had imbibed his learning; 

 they were like plays of his boyhood ; there he nursed the hopes and 

 ambitions of his youth. He passed a glorious career, though in toil and 

 anxiety; and in latter years in great occasional bodily pain. How grati- 

 fying to hear a universal acknowledgment of the masterly manner in 

 which he executed his supreme judicial office ! He never let a witness 

 prevaricate or a counsel wander from his subject. He had not a shewy 

 mind, and those who did not know him intimately and deeply were 

 surprised at his superiority. He threw no mist round his subjects, 

 and never grasped at shadows. The first thing he did was to reject 

 all vagueness, and bring the question or halo to the highest degree 

 of precision. He at once, by a sort of brief directness, put an end to 

 all that uncertainty, or impartial apprehension, or ignorance, or arti- 

 fice, which deals in superfluous words. Perhaps, therefore, he was 

 a little more inclined to the laconic, the sarcastic, and the cohtemp- 



