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spelt revolution. He opposed the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, the emancipation of the Romans Catholics and the Reform Bill with equal bigotry and honesty, and the resolute non possumus which he opposed to all the movements of his day contributed largely to the defeat and disintegration of the Tory party. As a judge he is entitled to the high credit of having strengthened the growing fixity of the principles of equity. "The doctrines of this court," he himself said in Gee v. Pritchard (2 Swan. 414), "ought to be as well settled and as uniform almost as those of the common law, laying down fixed principles, but taking care that they are to be applied according to the circumstances of each case. I cannot agree that the doctrines of this court are to be changed by every succeeding judge. Nothing would inflict on me greater pain than the recollection that I had done anything to justify the reproach, that the equity of this court varies like the chancellor's foot." This reproach certainly cannot be laid at Eldon's door; what he may, however, be justly charged with, is the fostering if not the parentage of that terrible accumulation of arrears of which the equity judges are only now getting rid. We have already noticed Lord Hardwicke's contributions to the increase of this malign brood. Lord Eldon was an even greater sinner. "It is unnecessary," says Mr. Kerly (ubi sup. 270), "to dwell upon the complaints made

LORD SELBORNE.

in the House of Commons and in the press of the day of the number of causes waiting after hearing for Lord Eldon's judgment, of cargoes rotting while he considered to whom they belonged, and of frantic appeals from ruined families, that some end might be put to the fatal continuance of their suits . . . The facts are indisputable that a common administration suit, where the parties were not hostile, took from three to five years; that eminent counsel stated that no man could begin a contested suit and hope to see its end; that clients were advised to compromise good claims and to plead to bad ones rather than risk a suit, and that on the average causes took at least three years to reach the top of the list after they were ready for hearing. The delay after the causes were ready for hear ing were the worst delays of all."

In order that we may overtake as many occupants of the woolsack as possible, we shall treat the remaining Lord Chancellors, whose names, even at the cost of some repetition, call for notice in this paper, in a somewhat more cursory style than we have hitherto adopted. Thomas Wilde, Lord Truro, the brother of Lord Penzance, the second son of a London attorney, was born in 1782, educated at St. Paul's School, and called to the bar of the Inner Temple in 1817. Overcoming by unremitting perseverance an impediment in his speech (a defect, by the way from which curiously enough Sir William Erle