She brought him no children, and the whole of his great possessions went to his brother Roland, a descendant of whom is still Lord of Redgrave.'

I shall conclude this memoir in the words of the writer who first collected materials for the Life of Holt, and who thus gives him characteristic praise: "His Lordship was always remarkable in nobly asserting, and as vigorously supporting, the rights and liberties of the subject, to which he paid the greatest regard upon all occasions, and never suffered the least reflection tending to depre ciate them to pass uncensured."'

1 George St. Vincent Wilson, Esq., great-great-grandson of Roland. 'Biographia Brit. "Sir John Holt.'

CHAPTER XXVI.

CHIEF JUSTICES FROM LORD HOLT TILL THE APPOINT◄ MENT OF SIR DUDLEY RYDER.

N the death of Chief Justice Holt, Lord Godolphin, the Prime Minister, resolved to give his place to Sergeant Parker, who, as one of the managers for the House of Commons in the impeachment of Sacheverell, had greatly distinguished himself. The' Attorney and Solicitor General, Sir James Montagu and Sir Robert Eyre, like all sensible men, disapproving of the prosecution, had been deficient in zeal when they assailed the libeler of VOLPONE; and neither of them had such political importance as to enable them to vindicate a claim to the promotion,-which would then have been peculiarly seasonable, as the Whigs had fallen into deep disgrace, and a change of administration was evidently at hand. The proposed appointment was very disagreeable to the Queen. Having attended Sacheverell's trial, she had been much shocked by the freedom with which Sergeant Parker had ridiculed the divine right of kings and other dogmas of the High Church party, and still more by the acrimony with which he had inveighed against "the Doctor' himself, whom she loved in her heart for his principles, secular as well as religious, and above all for his personal abuse of those ministers with whom she was now so much disgusted. But being warned by Harley, who already, through the Agency of Mrs. Masham, was her confidential adviser, that the time for a rupture with the Whigs was not yet quite arrived, she gave her reluctant consent.

Accordingly, on the 13th of March, 1710, SIR THOMAS PARKER was installed as Chief Justice of the Court of King's Bench, and continued to fill the office for the four remaining years of Queen Anne and the first four years of the succeeding reign. But tracing his eventful career

is a by-gone pleasure, for he afterwards held the great seal of England-till he was deprived of it on being convicted of judicial corruption. I must, therefore, refer those who would know the particulars of his extraordinary rise, and of his lamentable fall, to the "Life of Lord Chancellor Macclesfield," which I have already given to the world.'

However, I cannot refrain from expressing my regret that some connections of his family, ashamed of his having been the son of a village lawyer,-of his having been at Newport school, along with Tom Withers the shoemaker, of his having himself practiced as an attorney, and of his having raised himself by the gigantic vigor of intellect, would fain represent him as having enjoyed all the advantages of high birth and regular education,-as having been destined to the bar from his childhood, and as having reached his high honors in the usual routine of professional progress. In overlooking well-established facts respecting him, they surely lessen the merit which. belongs to him while he was ascending to eminence,and they deprive him of the mitigation of early penury for the disreputable practices into which he was led by his excessive love of riches. If I were to re-write his life, I must substantially adhere to my former narrative, -which if he could peruse he would not repudiate; for he never pretended to an aristocratical origin, and he was delighted, when Chief Justice of England, to spend an evening with an old school-fellow who had thrown aside a leathern apron, and whose hands were hard with resin.'

When Parker had gained the favor of George I., and, by intrigues with the Hanoverians who accompanied that sovereign to England, had subverted the influence of Lord Cowper, another Chief Justice of the King's Bench was to be provided. The new Chancellor was determined that he would not commit the blunder of raising up to high office a formidable rival, by whom he 1 Lives of Chancellors, vol. iv. ch. cxxi.

In a new edition of my Lives of the Chancellors I have pointed out his pedigree from the Parkers of Park Hall, and I have shown that he certainly had been entered of Trinity College, Cambridge; but the evidence is strengthened as to the low condition cf his father, and the obstacles he had to surmount in the early part of his career.

might in turn be superseded. He therefore fixed upon a dull lawyer, of decent character, to whom nothing positive could be objected, and who,-unfit to be placed in the House of Lords,-without aspiring to the "marble chair," must ever remain his humble supporter.

I am afraid that the taste of my readers may be a little corrupted by the exciting atrocities of the Chief J istices of the seventeenth century, and that some dismay may be felt upon the introduction of a man who is un redeemed from insipidity by the commission of a single great crime. I own that such company is tiresome, and we shall speedily take leave of him. But I must present a little sketch of this worthy person, who for seven years was Chief Justice of England.

SIR JOHN PRATT'S great distinction is, that he was the father of LORD CAMDEN. He was descended, however, from a respectable family long settled at Careswell Priory, near Collumpton, in the county of Devon. He studied at Oxford, and was elected a fellow of Wadham College. Although an eldest son, it was necessary that he should work for his bread, as the estate which had remained many generations in his name had been alienated by his spendthrift grandfather. He was, therefore, called to the bar in the end of the reign of Charles II., and, by plodding diligence, got into respectable business. In the year 1700 he took the degree of Sergeant-at-law, and he was twice returned to the House of Commons as member of Midhurst. But he had no talents for public speaking, and in the Parliamentary Debates his name is not once mentioned. He was a good Whig under the patronage of Lord Cowper, who, while disposed to promote him, found him quite unfit for the situation of Attorney or Solicitor General. His practice in the Court of Common Pleas, however, was considerable, for he was well versed in his profession; and, although reckoned heavy eleswhere, he there went by the name of the "lively Sergeant."

Having remained true to his party during the four years of Tory rule, on the accession of George I. the desire to do something for his advancement was strengthened. Lord Cowper, being restored to the office of Chancellor, in his letter to George I. respecting

the state of the bench in Westminster Hall, objected to the continuance of the two brothers Sir Littleton Powys and Sir Thomas Powys as Judges of the King's Bench, particularly Sir Thomas, whom he denounces as "zealously instrumental in the measures which ruined James II., and as still devoted to the Pretender," and added, "If either of these be removed, I humbly recommend Sergeant Pratt, whom the Chief Justice Parker, and I believe every one that knows him, will approve." Accordingly Sir Thomas Powys was superseded, and Sergeant Pratt, being knighted, was made a Puisne Judge of the King's Bench in his stead.

He sat four years there as a colleague of Parker, who, having during this time had full proof of his docility, inoffensiveness, and moderate sufficiency for the duties of the office, when about to become Lord Chancellor resolved to appoint him his successor. As a step to this distinction, in the short interval between the resignation of the great seal by Lord Cowper and the delivery of it to Lord Macclesfield, it was put into commission, and Pratt was made a Lord Commissioner.

He took his seat as Lord Chief Justice of the King's Bench on the 15th of May, 1718.

His panegyrists (for a Chief Justice is sure to have panegyrists) lauded him-not as a great real property lawyer, or a great commercial lawyer, or as a great Crown lawyer, but as "A GREAT SESSIONS LAWYER;" and in looking through Strange's Reports, Lord Raymond's Reports, Burrow's Reports, and Modern Reports, in which his decisions are recorded, it is curious to observe how many of them turn upon questions of poor-rates and parochial settlement-then a new field of litigation. One, and one only, of these judgments is still interesting, from having been married to immortal verse.

The widow of a foreigner, being left destitute on the death of her husband, who had no parochial settlement in England, was removed from a parish in London to the parish in the country in which she was born; but this parish appealed to the quarter-sessions against the order of removal, on the ground that a maiden settlement is for ever lost by marriage. The Justices at sessions, being much puzzled, referred the case to the