of Dartmoor, had been purchased by Dunning, on very advantageous terms, of the Creswell family, together with Bagter (a manor of itself, within the manor and parish of Ilsington, near Ashburton), once the inheritance of the Fords, and the birth place of the dramatic poet of that name. We believe a considerable portion of this estate will revert in about twelve years hence to the possession of the Creswells. Besides all this landed property, Lord Ashburton left about a hundred and eighty thousand pounds in money. The title is now extinct, the successor of the first lord having died some years since without heirs. It is said that the attorney who had the arrangement of Dunning's papers immediately after his death, discovered among them a proof-sheet of Junius's Letters, corrected in his hand-writing; and Dr. Tucker, of Ashburton, has put forth a pamphlet with the intent to prove that he was actually the author of them. Mrs. Olivia Wilmot Serres, too, in the publication wherein she claims this distinction for her uncle, Dr. Wilmot, says she has no doubt, from letters found among his papers, that both Dunning and Lord Shelburne were in the secret of the authorship at the time of the publication. This last assertion is certainly more feasible than the hypothesis of Dr. Tucker, and is quite compatible with an averment often made by the late Lord Lansdowne (Shelburne), that Dunning wrote not one word of the letters; but the authenticity of her statement must of course depend upon the fact of Dr. Wilmot's being the real Junius; a fact which the public, we believe, have somewhat ungallantly refused to take upon trust from his niece. We are not about to plunge into the depths of this intricate controversy; nor indeed do we consider it at all necessary, in order to show that Dunning was not the man. That Junius cannot have been a professional lawyer appears, as Mr. Butler has very aptly remarked, from the inaccuracy of his legal expressions; as, for instance, where he says that "the King, Lords, and Commons are the trustees, not the owners of the estate; the fee simple is in the people:" whereas in all trusts of the inheritance the fee simple is in the trustees. To this we shall only add that Junius's first letter is dated January 21st, 1769, that Dunning was at that time Solicitor-general, and that he did not resign his office till more than a year afterwards. Another work of very minor importance has been supposed to be in part the composition of Dunning; an octavo pamphlet of fifty-three pages, dated April, 1764, bearing the title of "A Letter to the Proprietors of East India Stock, on the subject of Lord Clive's Jaghire." There is not however, the shadow of an authority for attributing any share in this production to him; though it is not difficult to conceive how the notion may have first arisen, from his being avowedly the writer of another pamphlet on East India affairs. That pamphlet is, so far as we know, the only authenticated work of his pen. If he ever had the taste, he never could spare the time for literary composition; and accordingly his fame, unsupported by durable monuments of genius, is of that perishable character which we represented at the outset as the general lot of the most eminent members of the English Bar. B. ART. IV.-LORD BROUGHAM'S JUDGMENTS. Reports of Cases argued and determined in the High Court of Chancery. By J. RUSSELL & J. W. MYLNE, Esqrs. Vol. I. Part 2. SINCE the days of 'the admirable CRICHTON' no individual can be mentioned among the luminaries of modern times who has challenged so large a share of public wonder and delight, on the score of his multifarious and almost boundless acquisitions, as the extraordinary personage, whose least distinguishing excellence, perhaps, it is to stand at the head of the fegal profession, and fill the situation of the highest judicial functionary in the kingdom.1 Scotland has the distinction of having given birth to both these celebrated persons; but their 1 To Lord Brougham may be justly applied the compliment paid in the following punning epigram addressed to his illustrious countryman Buchanan :- Κἂν Βυχανάνε πατρὶς Σκοτίη това κἂν ονομάζῃ Σὺ Σκότος, ὁυ σκότος έῖ, ἀλλὰ φόως πατρίδος. fame belongs to Europe. CRICHTON's pre-eminence in every branch of attainable knowledge was extolled by a foreign contemporary writer1 in a strain of such warm, and apparently extravagant panegyric, as to excite a suspicion of its sincerity among those who were unable or unwilling to believe in the possibility of reaching a degree of excellence so far exceeding the usual bounds of credibility, and the ordinary powers of the human understanding. This scepticism, touching the pretensions of CRICHTON, might be generated or strengthened by the publication of some careless compositions, in which the genius or learning of the all-accomplished writer was not remarkably conspicuous. But the fame of that extraordinary person, on whatever basis it might be founded, was too widely disseminated to be affected by the opinions of the envious or discerning few who were disposed to question the soundness of his pretensions. All Europe rang with his intellectual achievements. If we may credit the accounts of his contemporaries, he mastered all the learning of his age with preternatural facility; profoundly skilled in omni scibili, he threw down the gauntlet to all mankind, and vanquished all his antagonists, at their own weapons, in every assignable department of art, literature, and science. "He was at every thing in the ring," to use a phrase which has been applied to his distinguished countryman, on whom his mantle appears to have fallen, and in every thing he was successful. Those stores of knowledge, which it cost other men the labour of years to accumulate, CRICHTON could, by an ingenious process of his own, at once unlock and appropriate; and, as if born to demonstrate the fallacy of the adage that there was no royal road to mathematical learning, he could skip, by a short cut, to the very heights of science, which to ordinary mortals were accessible only by slow and laborious approaches. He was a meteor, whose short but brilliant course seems to have dazzled and astonished his contemporaries, however faint may be the traces of its brightness in the few insignificant productions by which he has enabled posterity to judge of his literary pretensions. In this last particular the parallel, which may in many respects be successfully drawn between CRICHTON and the eminent person to whom we have ventured to compare him, 1 Ald. Manut. dedic. ad Ciceronis Paradox, Venet. 1581. must be admitted to fail; and the failure serves to enhance our admiration of the versatile genius of the Chancellor, whose literary productions, when the circumstances under which many of them have been produced, and the multiplicity and conflicting nature of his occupations are duly considered, may be ranked among the most extraordinary of his achievements, and are destined, perhaps, in the opinion of some of his contemporaries, to be referred to as the most lasting monuments of his fame. That an advocate in full practice at the English bar should be found night after night at his post in the House of Commons, enlightening that body by effusions of eloquence, which not unfrequently rivalled the most brilliant harangues of antiquity, and that, in the midst of these occupations, he should find or make time to guide the public taste by his contributions to reviews, and to instruct his fellowcitizens by the publication of treatises, not less original than profound, on branches of mathematical science, are facts calculated to excite not less astonishment, and entitled to more admiration, because more indisputably ascertained, than any of the marvels attributed to "the admirable" CRICHTON. Even in these stirring times, when politics might be supposed to engross all of the Chancellor's attention which was not devoted to the business of his Court, it is well known that he has been long engaged in, and is shortly about to publish, a Commentary on Paley's Natural Theology; a work for the undertaking of which the venerable author, at an advanced period of life, deemed it necessary to subject himself, by way of preliminary discipline, to a regular course of anatomical study. Those who reason from premises by which the march of genius is not to be circumscribed, may be puzzled at finding that the investigation of the structure of a sloth or a hippopotamus may peradventure have occupied some of those hours which, in their narrow estimate of probabilities, or of the limits of human capacity, they imagined to be exclusively devoted to the enucleation of legal difficulties, the adjustment of the politics of Europe, and the settlement of the great domestic question of Reform. How far the multifarious pursuits in which Lord Brougham is engaged may consist with the successful cultivation of that department of law, which it is his duty, in the discharge of his high judicial functions, to administer, and with the principles and practice of which he was confessedly, when he was raised to his present station, entirely unacquainted, we shall not in this place undertake to discuss. Law is a jealous mistress, and seldom imparts her favours to votaries whose assiduities are divided with other objects of attachment-by favours, we mean "the gladsome light of jurisprudence," as Lord Coke calls it; not the honours and emoluments which may or may not accompany such light, though, for the nonce, they may be said to accompany it like a shadow, seeing that the shadow is greatest when the light is least. But to Lord Brougham, if we may rely upon those who swear by and for him, all things are possible, or rather, in his hands that which is impossible is practicable, and practicable it should seem, according to the swaggering paradox of Napoleon, because it is impossible. When, in the last session of parliament, some notice was taken in the House of Commons of the inconvenience likely to result from the appointment of a Nisi Prius advocate, whose professional pretensions were founded rather upon his eloquence than upon his law, to fill an office, the duties of which cannot be efficiently discharged without a profound, or, at any rate, a competent knowledge of the law of real property, the present Attorney-general assured the House and the country, that if he knew any thing of his noble friend, Lord Brougham would either speedily qualify himself for his high office, or perish in the attempt. Both the pledge, and the way in which it was or was not to be fulfilled, had an air of chivalry peculiar to the speeches and the character of the Attorney-general. If we remember rightly the phraseology of Sir Thomas Denman, and understand correctly the process of reasoning by which he arrived at his conclusions, it was by Lord Brougham's Herculean powers of application as well as by the extraordinary depth and strength of his understanding, that the splendid result he anticipated was to be so speedily accomplished. Be that as it may, the last Number of the Reports of Messrs. Russell and Mylne contains five of his Lordship's judgments; we have, therefore, a foot from which we may in some measure judge of the judicial Hercules; a brick, from which some conjectures may be formed by the profession as to the strength and durability |