William Murray, Earl of Mansfield, lord-chief-justice of the king’s bench, was the fourth son of Andrew, viscount Stormont, and was born at Perth, Mar. 2, 1705. He studied at Christ-church, Oxford, took the degree of M.A. in 1730, and was called to the bar in 1731. He soon acquired an extensive practice—mainly, it would seem, on account of his facility and force as a speaker, for neither then nor at any subsequent period of his career was he reckoned a very erudite lawyer—and was often employed on appeal cases before the house of lords. In 1743 he was appointed by the ministry solicitor-general, entered the house of commons as member for Boroughbridge, and at once took a high position. In 1746 he acted, ex officio, as counsel against the rebel lords, Lovat, Balmerino and Kilmarnock; was appointed king’s attorney in 1754; and at this time stood so high that, had not the keenness of his ambition been mitigated by a well-founded distrust of his fitness for leading the house, he might have aspired to the highest political honors. He became chief-justice of the king’s bench in 1756, and entered the House of Lords under the title of baron Mansfield of Mansfield in the county of Nottingham. Still his political rôle has little interest for posterity. As his opinions were not those of the popular side, he was exposed to much abuse and party hatred. Junius, among others, bitterly attacked him; and during the Gordon riots of 1780, his house, with all his valuable books and manuscripts, was burned. He declined, with much dignity, indemnification by parliament. In 1776 Murray was made earl of Mansfield. He worked hard as a judge till 1788, when age and ill-health forced him to resign. He died Mar. 20, 1793, in the 89th year of his age.

Personal

  Your fate depends upon your success there as a speaker; and, take my word for it, that success turns much more upon Manner than Matter. Mr. Pitt, and Mr. Murray the Solicitor-General, are, beyond comparison, the best speakers. Why? Only because they are the best orators. They alone can inflame or quiet the House; they alone are attended to in that numerous and noisy assembly, that you might hear a pin fall while either of them is speaking. Is it that their matter is better, or their arguments stronger, than other people’s? Does the House expect extraordinary information from them? Not in the least; but the House expects pleasure from them, and therefore attends; finds it, and therefore approves.

  In all debates of consequence Murray, the attorney general, had greatly the advantage over Pitt in point of argument; and, abuse only excepted, was not much his inferior in any part of oratory.

  As a speaker in the House of Lords, where was his competitor? The grace of his action, and the fire and vivacity of his looks, are still present to imagination; and the harmony of his voice yet vibrates in the ear of those who have been accustomed to listen to him. His Lordship possessed the strongest powers of discrimination; his language was elegant and perspicuous, arranged with the happiest method, and applied with the utmost extent of human ingenuity; his images were often bold, and always just; but the character of his eloquence is that of being flowing, perspicuous, convincing, and affecting.

  This gentleman had raised himself to great eminence at the bar by the most keen, intuitive spirit of apprehension, that seemed to seize every object at first glance; an innate sagacity, that saved the trouble of intense application; and an irresistible stream of eloquence, that flowed pure and classical, strong and copious, reflecting in the most conspicuous point of view the subject over which it rolled, and sweeping before it all the slime of formal hesitation and all the intangling weeds of chicanery.

  Our language has no term of reproach, the mind has no idea of detestation, which has not already been applied to you, and exhausted. Ample justice has been done by abler pens than mine to the separate merits of your life and character. Let it be my humble office to collect the scattered sweets until their united virtue tortures the sense…. Yet you continue to support an Administration which you know is universally odious, and which on some occasions you yourself speak of with contempt. You would fain be thought to take no share in government, while, in reality, you are the mainspring of the machine. Here, too, we trace the little, prudential policy of a Scotchman. Instead of acting that open, generous part, which becomes your rank and station, you meanly skulk into the closet and give your Sovereign such advice as you have not spirit to avow or defend. You secretly engross the power while you decline the title of minister; and though you dare not be Chancellor, you know how to secure the emoluments of the office. Are the seals to be forever in commission, that you may enjoy five thousands pounds a year.

  At Lady Colvill’s, to whom I am proud to introduce any stranger of eminence, that he may see what dignity and grace is to be found in Scotland, an officer observed, that he had heard Lord Mansfield was not a great English lawyer. JOHNSON. “Why, Sir, supposing Lord Mansfield not to have the splendid talents which he possesses, he must be a great English lawyer, from having been so long at the bar, and having passed through so many of the great offices of the law. Sir, you may as well maintain that a carrier, who has driven a packhorse between Edinburgh and Berwick for thirty years, does not know the road, as Lord Mansfield does not know the law of England.”

  I cannot recollect the time, when, sitting at the table with Lord Mansfield, I ever failed to remark that happy and engaging art, which he possessed, of putting the company present in good humour with themselves; I am convinced they naturally liked him the more for his seeming to like them so well: this has not been the general property of all the witty, great, and learned men; whom I have looked up to in my course of life…. Lord Mansfield would lend his ear most condescendingly to his company, and cheer the least attempt at humour with the prompt payment of a species of laugh, which cost his muscles no exertion, but was merely a subscription that he readily threw in towards the general hilarity of the table. He would take his share in the small talk of the ladies with all imaginable affability; he was in fact, like most men, not in the least degree displeased at being incensed by their flattery.

  In private Lord Mansfield appears to have been much and justly beloved. His moral character was blameless. In his friendships he was warm and constant; in his charities judicious and discriminating, not bestowing small sums to relieve himself from present importunities, but assisting in a more substantial manner those who were capable of benefiting by such kindness. In society and especially at his own table, he was remarkable for the liveliness and intelligence of his conversation, in which, however, he never indulged to the exclusion of others. One of his most distinguishing characteristics was the decorum and propriety that pervaded not only his actions but his manners, his personal appearance and even his domestic establishment, in every department of which good sense and good taste were seen conjoined. Lord Mansfield’s features were regular and expressive, and his presence graceful and dignified.

  In closeness of argument, in happiness of illustration, in copiousness and grace of diction, the oratory of Murray was unsurpassed; and, indeed, in all the qualities which conspire to form an able debater, he is allowed to have been Pitt’s superior. When measures were attacked, no one was better capable of defending them; when reasoning was the weapon employed, none handled it with such effect; but against declamatory invective his very temperament incapacitated him from contending with so much advantage. He was like an accomplished fencer, invulnerable to the thrusts of a small sword, but not equally able to ward off the downright stroke of a bludgeon.

  Even the learned on the continent of Europe, who had hitherto looked upon English lawyers as very contracted in their views of jurisprudence, and had never regarded the decisions of our courts as settling any international question, acknowledged that a great jurist had at last been raised up among us, and they placed his bust by the side of Grotius and D’Aguesseau. In his own lifetime, and after he had only a few years worn his ermine, he acquired the designation by which he was afterwards known, and by which he will be called when, five hundred years hence, his tomb is shown in Westminster Abbey—that of “THE GREAT LORD MANSFIELD.”… Lord Mansfield must, I think, be considered the most prominent legal character, and the brightest ornament to the profession of the law, that appeared in England during the last century.

  At the bar his mere statement of a case, by its extreme lucidity, was supposed to be worth the argument of any other man. As a statesman his fame is tarnished by his blind adhesion to the policy of coercing America, nor is his name associated with any statute of first-rate importance. Macaulay terms him, however, “the father of modern toryism, of toryism modified to suit an order of things in which the House of Commons is the most powerful body in the state.” As a judge, by his perfect impartiality, inexhaustible patience, and the strength and acumen of his understanding, he ranks among the greatest who have ever administered justice. Such was his ascendency over his colleagues, that during the first twelve years of his tenure of office they invariably, though by no means insignificant lawyers, concurred in his judgment.

General

  He excelled in the statement of a case. One of the first orators of the present age said of it “that it was of itself worth the argument of any other man.”

  The Reports of Burrow, Cowper, and Douglass contain the substance of Lord Mansfield’s judicial decisions; and they are among the most interesting reports in the English law…. We should have known but very little of the great mind and varied accomplishments of Lord Mansfield if we had not been possessed of the faithful reports of his decisions. It is there that his title of the character of “founder of the Commercial Law of England” is verified.

  If we possess hardly any remains of Lord Mansfield’s speeches at the bar or in parliament, we have considerable materials from which to form an estimate of his judicial eloquence. The Reports of Sir James Burrows are carefully corrected, to all appearance; probably by the learned Judges themselves. Many of the judgments of the Chief Justice are truly admirable in substance, as well as composition; and upon some of the greater questions, his oratory rises to the full height of the occasion. It would be difficult to overrate the merit of the celebrated address to the public, then in a state of excitement almost unparalleled, with which he closed his judgment upon the application to reverse Wilkes’s outlawry. Great elegance of composition, force of diction, just and strong but natural expression of personal feelings, a commanding attitude of defiance to lawless threats, but so assumed and so tempered with the dignity which was natural to the man, and which here as on all other occasions, he sustained throughout, all render this one of the most striking productions on record.

  Though, besides the three judges whom he found on the bench of his court, there were no less than eight who took their places afterwards as his colleagues, it is a strong evidence of the soundness of his law that during the thirty-two years of his presidency there were only two cases in which the whole bench were not unanimous: and, what is still more extraordinary, two only of his judgments were reversed on appeal: but some of them were not entirely approved by the legal community. The system on which he acted was censured as introducing too much of the Roman law into our jurisprudence; and he was charged with overstepping the boundary between equity and law, and of allowing the principles of the former to operate too strongly in his legal decisions. How far these criticisms were justified still remains a question: but recent legislation proves how little his system deserved censure.

  Lord Mansfield’s chief intellectual merit as a judge is, that in a great measure, he created the law which he pronounced. He made the commercial law of England. To him we owe the settled form and principles of the law of negotiable paper and insurance. He was accused by some of his contemporaries of confounding equitable with legal principles in his administration, and certainly he did brush away the artificial and trivial notions of old time with an unsparing hand. But he cast the legal future of England in a grand horoscope. He judged rightly of the necessities of a more modern state of society, and of the rapidly growing grandeur of his country’s commerce. He built for the future as well as the then present, and we in our day have not out-grown or distanced his wise provisions. Only two of his decisions were reversed during his tenure of judicial office, and his authority is higher to-day than it was then. So truly was he the creator of the law of bills that it is almost laughable to read of his laying down for the first time principles which are now as certain and familiar “as those which guide the planets in their orbits.” He also adorned the law of evidence to an unprecedented extent: as one has said of him, “he found it brick, he layed it of marble.” He pronounced against the legality of employing “puffers” at an action. He exploded the dogma of escheat in case of wrecks, where no living thing comes ashore.