credit to a very extraordinary claim-that of having belonged to all the "liberal professions," and would account very satisfactorily for his having so heartily espoused the Whig cause. After retiring from the army, Mr. Erskine went to Cambridge, and was called to the bar in 1778; in 1783 he was made King's Counsel, and in 1806 appointed Lord-Chancellor. The change of his uniform for a silk gown did not, however, annihilate his military feelings, for during the war he was Colonel of the Law Association Volunteers; and it was while in command of this distinguished corps, at a review in Hyde Park, that he gave one of the many amusing proofs of his talent for repartee. It was the King's birthday, and the royal cavalcade having passed down the line, the Duke of Cambridge fell back and spoke to Erskine, saying, "How well your corps behaves! are they all lawyers?" "Yes, sir," he replied; "and some of them very good lawyers too." "And good soldiers," said the Duke; "for how silent they are!" "Yes," said Erskine; "but does your Royal Highness recollect that we have no pay?" Lord Erskine had not lost his military spirit at the age of sixty-five, for, in one of his letters, written from the Continent in July 1815, he observes, "As soon as I return you shall have an account of my tour with the army in France, and going with it to Paris we shall have peace at last." "Neither Lord Erskine's conversation," writes Mr. Croker, "(though, even to the last, remarkable for fluency and vivacity) nor his parliamentary speeches, ever bore any proportion to the extraordinary force of his forensic eloquence. Those who only knew him in private, or in the House of Commons, had some difficulty in believing the effect he produced at the bar. During the last few years of his life his conduct was eccentric, and justified a suspicion, and even a hope, that his understanding was impaired." Eccentric he certainly was towards the close of his life. A friend of mine met him one afternoon walking in the Park, accompanied by his little dog (that, with reverential feeling, he had christened after the great orator of his party), and asked him what had been going on in the House of Lords the night before? when he replied, "Oh, it was all G-d d-n butter and Ireland. Fox, Fox," he continued, as he walked on, whistling to his fourfooted representative of Charles James, "Fox, Fox," &c. Lord Erskine's attachment to the memory of his friend was very great, and the following lines, also in the Beau's collection, were written by him, at Oatlands, on receiving a lock of his hair from Her Royal Highness the Duchess of York: "Could reliques, as at Rome they show, This hallow'd little lock of hair Might soothe the patriot's anxious care; From the dark grave none come again. That spirits wait on human weal The head that bore, the hand that gave!" It is singular, considering the number of witty but briefless barristers, which either an increase in the population and therefore in their own numbers, or a disinclination to employ them, has left in the enjoyment of learned leisure, that not one of them should have amused himself and others with the biography of their great model, and collected the jeux d'esprit, impromptus, and other memorials of his humour and talent, with which he used to "humbug the jury, and browbeat the judge." The description of the dinnerparty at the Duke of York's is an interesting specimen of the light and lively spirit which, at sixty-two years of age, animated this great advocate's leisure hours, after his retirement from public life. His egotism, which has so often been complained of by his contemporaries, and which has been alluded to by Sheridan in "The Eagle and the Wren," "I'm quite contented with my own applause," is certainly not perceptible in that poem. Lord Erskine seems to have been amiably occupied in selecting topics for praise in others, instead of extorting their admiration for himself, which he is represented by Lord Byron to have done, to a most unpleasant degree, in the summer of the very same |