Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition/Sir William Webb Follett

FOLLETT, Sir William Webb (1798–1845), attorney-general of England, was born at Topsham in Devonshire, December 2, 1798. He was the son of Captain Benjamin Follett, who had retired from the army in 1790, and engaged in business at Topsham. His mother was an Irish lady of Kinsale. The early indications which he gave of superior abilities induced his father to bring him up for the bar. He received his early education at Exeter grammar-school, of which Dr Lempriere, author of the well-known Classical Dictionary, was then head-master. After a short course of study under a private tutor, he entered, in 1814, Trinity College, Cambridge, and two years later the Inner Temple. In 1818 he took his degree of B.A. without academical honours, and the same year settled in London, becoming a pupil of Godfrey Sykes and Robert Bayley, two of the most eminent special pleaders of the day. He began to practise as a pleader below the bar in 1821, was called to the bar in 1824, and joined the western circuit in 1825. At the very outset his great qualifications were universally recognized, and his rapid rise was assured. He was thoroughly master of his profession, having devoted himself to it with exclusive zeal; and with remarkable quickness of perception he combined a solidity and ripeness of judgment such as are rarely seen in one so young. The statements current soon after his death as to the frequent interruption of his studies by ill health are emphatically contradicted by Lord Brougham. His rapid and continuous success was owing not only to his unquestionable superiority, but to his singular courtesy, kindness, and sweetness of temper. In 1830 he married the eldest daughter of Sir Ambrose Harding Gifford, chief justice of Ceylon. His reputation in Westminster Hall being solidly established, he sought in 1832 an entrance into parliament, and offered himself as candidate for the city of Exeter on the Conservative side. On this occasion he failed; but in 1835 he was returned for the same city at the head of the poll. In parliament he early succeeded in gaining the ear of the house, and attained a position of high distinction. Under the first administration of Sir Robert Peel, Follett was appointed solicitor-general (November 1834), but resigned with the ministry in April 1835. In the course of this year he was knighted. On the return of Peel to power in 1841 Sir William was again appointed solicitor-general, and in April 1844 he succeeded Sir Frederick Pollock as attorney-general. But his health, which had begun to fail him in 1838, and had been permanently injured by a severe illness in 1841, now broke down, and he was compelled to relinquish practice and to visit the south of Europe. He returned to England in March 1845; but the disease, consumption, reasserted itself, and he died in London on the 28th of June following. His death was mourned as a loss not only to the profession but to his country, and the public esteem for his character was marked by the attendance at his funeral in the Temple Church of many distinguished persons, the lord chancellor, the first lord of the treasury, and the chief justice of the common pleas being among the pall-bearers. A noble statue of Follett, executed by Behnes, was erected by subscription in St Paul's cathedral. (See Brougham's notice of Follett, Works, vol. iv.)