No politician is infallible; they in censuring their adversaries must judge according to their lights, and measure men by the standard they deem true. Dr. Crompton, who was eager and sincere in his advocacy of the rights of the people, then invaded largely by the operation of the corruptions which time and design conjointly introduce into the working of all forms of government, was slow to suppose the powerful opponents of his opinions, his opponents on conviction. Something of his habit of imputing bad motives to political adversaries was observable in Charles Crompton in his earlier days, but age and reflection softened the accusing spirit within him, though with a sort of filial piety he was late in admitting Canning to absolution. This venial shade of illiberality cannot be regarded by any one as a sign of a narrow mind, seeing how few at any time of life, whatever be their political or religious creed, ever become truly tolerant and catholic. The temporary errors of the leaders or members of a party in times of violent excitement are said to run with their creed; and exclusive claims to loyalty or to the love of freedom are loudly and unreasonably preferred, without reference to the limitations to which such feelings and predilections must be subjected—as times, races, climes, forms of government, knowledge, and virtue, various and varying, require. The true liberal is the man who possesses ever the liberal mind, and the truly loyal man is he who is loyal to the whole constitution under which he lives, not merely to some part of it; to its living, variable, and growing spirit, not merely to its letter. It is the letter which kills.

The Doctor's propensity to quiz passed by an easy transition into the mind of his son, but it seldom mingled itself there with any bitterness, and was but the indulgence of a playful mimic malice, which tickled rather than tortured his victims. Yet to hear him speak of his love of this sport, one who knew him but imperfectly might have supposed him a "laughing devil," an Asmodeus, unroofing men's houses to expose the faults and follies of the inmates. He exaggerated his

propensity to the dear delight of giving pain, and would invite a companion to the baiting ground-the robing room-with a laughing speech, “Come, let us go and torture old

"Cela fait passer une heure ou deux."

Upon leaving the university, Charles Crompton entered the office of Mr. Denison, a solicitor at Liverpool. The Doctor had originally intended his son Charles for that branch of the profession of the law. By the advice of Mr. Denison his career was changed. That gentleman soon perceived in him signs of promise, and persuaded Dr. Crompton that his son would be likely to rise to eminence at the Bar. By Mr. Denison's advice he was entered, in the year 1817, of the Middle Temple, and placed as a pupil in the chambers of Littledale, to be educated for the Bar. He was about twenty years of age when this auspicious change in his fortunes took place, which planted his foot on the first step of the ladder to the Bench. It was due to the discernment of a comparative stranger, and though parents are commonly accused of blindness to the faults of their offspring, they are as often apt to be blind in their judgment of their children to the signs of future eminence. The future thinker is pronounced dull, and the liveliest of the brood is the victim of much silly prediction.

Charles Crompton served under great masters in the then ascendant art of special pleading, in which he became himself a great proficient. No man ever rose to eminence in it—for we must distinguish between eminence and practice—who had not a clear head, and the capacity to become a correct thinker. After the elevation of his first master to the Bench, his next and last was Patteson, of whom he often spoke with affection as "dear old Pat." Of his two masters he most resembled the first. In quickness and acuteness of intellect, in the rapid evolutions of his own thought, in readiness of resource, and in a certain subtle and over refining speculation, in hesitation, after chewing the cud of his opinions, about the soundness of his conclusions-doubts concerning them ordinarily shared by

no other mind—he bore a good resemblance to the celebrated lawyer whose chambers he entered in his first year of pupilage.

He might have said with old Selden, that "the proverbial assertion that the Lady Common Law must lye alone, never wrought with me." So far from condemning the Lady Common Law to a cabin couch, he gave her one as ample as the great bed at Ware, and crowded it with companions. He was, in truth, an insatiate devourer of books. That he had read a great deal of law during his education for the Bar as a student was necessarily to be inferred from the large stores of legal learning which he possessed even in the first years of his practice. He used to say that he owed his knowledge of law to Williams' Saunders. It was always a mystery to some of his associates in those early days of his forensic life what part of his day he devoted to law reading, whether from the morning or from the night he abstracted those "sex horas" which even Lord Coke deemed sufficient. On entering his room, which for disorder might have competed with the chamber of Dr. Orkborne in Madame d'Arblay's then popular novel of "Camilla," he would be found lolling on the hardest and most shining of all ancient black horse-hair sofas, reading some novel, play, newspaper, or magazine. He probably devoted hist evenings to severer studies, or, as he was always a bad sleeper, He was at the night may have been in part so consumed.

Dr.

once the most rapid and the most retentive of readers. Johnson has been described as eviscerating a book. Charles Crompton sprang upon a book like a cheetah upon a young pig, seizing the prey by the throat, and sucking out its A very retentive memory may be life's blood in a moment. either a blessing or a curse, according to the use made of it. Montaigne says that all old fools have good memories, but the judge was one of those to whom a good memory is a blessing; he possessed a copiousness, readiness, and aptness of quotation seldom surpassed. Some scholars are all quotation and no thought, but he was merciful: he used his stores discreetly. He had always ready at hand in due season some "half mad

thing of witty rhymes," or some saying, the aptness of the application of which revealed a man of wit. His reading was universal—books of science and philosophy, abstruse treatises, requiring close attention and deep thought, plays, novels, poetry, reviews, magazines, newspapers, and even street ballads found in him an eager reader, or listener; the veriest trash was better than no book at all; the dust-bin is not always all dust, and in Macaulay's hands, street lampoons and pasquinades subserve the muse of history. His passion for novels never abated; he read them all-good, bad, or indifferent; he was a laughing critic of Alfred Percy's law, as Henry Roscoe, in his "Westminster Hall," laughed at Miss Brunton's description of a capias in her novel of "Self Control." When he travelled the circuit as a judge, he would occasionally buy a novel at a railway station, read it after dinner, and rather than sit at Nisi Prius in suspense, finish it rapidly the next morning at breakfast, devouring its interesting pages whilst neglecting his dry toast, which, like the dinners of heroines, remained untasted on his plate. His reading flowed over, into, and enriched his talk without choking the spring, or destroying the originality of his mind. He never lost the quaintness and oddity which his natural humour gave him. He was seldom without a book; he carried a well-thumbed little pocket "Horace" constantly in his coat pocket. His reading in his earlier days lay by choice amongst those writers who have lashed the follies, weaknesses, and lighter vices of mankind. Rabelais was one of his favorite authors. He was well read in our best moralists and essayists, deeply read in the literature of the stage, and especially in our elder dramatists. He had many of the plays of Ben Jonson so imprinted on his memory, that he would be constantly finding likenesses between the "humours" of some of his contemporaries and those delineated. by the poet, from whom he quoted as abundantly as most men quote from Shakespeare, the universal. The novels of Fielding, and especially the pages of "Jonathan Wild," furnished him with many an allusion, quotation, or apt illustration. The

scene where Jonathan Wild is turned adrift in the boat at sea, his cocking his hat and looking fierce, with his exclamation, "d-me, who's afraid!" till remembering that no one beheld him, he became again dejected; the parallel drawn of the greatness of Jonathan Wild with that of conquerors, Jonathan's maxims, especially the first-" Never to do more mischief to any one than the occasion required, since mischief was much too precious a thing to be wasted," were the subjects frequently of his praise; it was a book from which he frequently quoted. He would quote also much from "Martinus Scriblerus," and match one speculation which afforded him much mirth, viz., "Whether God loves a possible angel better than an actually existing fly," with some corresponding droll fancies, and ingenious wonderings. But he did not draw his fun from books alone; there was a fruitful spring of original humour within him; and when he mixed the waters of his own wit with those drawn from highest sources, there was no turbid mixture from his own flow to defile

"The hallowed bowels of the silver Thames."

He did not love argumentation; he was somewhat impatient of a prepared train of argument; he would make a thrust, or deal a hard blow, and fly laughing off from the discussion, and not seldom thus end it by a jest which was in itself a convincing argument. Such he was, when in 1821 he joined the Northern Circuit. The boy is father of the man; his character was already formed, though it became more fully developed later in life, and grew to be also softened and refined. He did not change, but grew, and throughout life he wore no disguise. A Bench, whether episcopal or judicial, is a transformer sometimes, but he never assumed any quality which he had not, nor put off any that he had. Sibi constitit.

The Northern Circuit was at that time remarkably affluent in great lawyers; and in Brougham it possessed, besides, one great orator and great man. The class of men who are not destined to lead causes, but are doomed to draw, useful wheelers,