elected Downing professor of laws at Cambridge, an office he held till his death in 1860.
Amos was throughout life a persistent student, and published various books of importance on legal, constitutional, and literary subjects.
His first book was an examination into certain trials in the courts in Canada relative to the destruction of the Earl of Selkirk's settlement on the Red River. It had been alleged that in June 1816 the servants of the North-West Company had destroyed that settlement and murdered Governor Temple and twenty of his people. A few accused persons were brought to trial before the courts of law in Upper Canada, and they were all acquitted. Amos reproduced and criticised the proceedings at some of these trials, and denounced the state of things as one ‘to which no British colony had hitherto afforded a parallel, private vengeance arrogating the functions of public law; murder justified in a British court of judicature, on the plea of exasperation commencing years before the sanguinary act; the spirit of monopoly raging in all the terrors of power, in all the force of organisation, in all the insolence of impunity.’
In 1825 Amos edited for the syndics of the university of Cambridge Fortescue's ‘De Laudibus Legum Angliæ,’ appending the English translation of 1775, and original notes, or rather dissertations, by himself. These notes are full of antiquarian research into the history of English law. His name is familiar in the legal world through the treatise on the law of fixtures, which he published, in concert with Mr. Ferrard, in 1827, when the law on the subject was wholly unsettled, never having been treated systematically. He found a congenial part of his task to consist in the examination of the legal history of heirlooms, charters, crown jewels, deer, fish, and ‘things’ annexed to the freehold of the church, such as mourning hung in the church, tombstones, pews, organs, and bells.
He had shared with Mr. March Phillipps the task of bringing out a treatise on the law of evidence, and had taken upon himself the whole charge of the preparation of the eighth edition, published in 1838; when, in 1837, he went to India, he had not quite finished the work.
In 1846 he wrote ‘The Great Oyer of Poisoning,’ an account of the trial of the Earl of Somerset for poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury, a subject important for its bearing on the constitutional aspects of state trials. In the same year he dedicated to his lifelong friend, Dr. Whewell, four ‘Lectures on the Advantages of a Classical Education as auxiliary to a Commercial Education.’
Among his purely constitutional treatises may be mentioned ‘The Ruins of Time exemplified in Sir Matthew Hale's Pleas of the Crown’ (1856). The object of this was to advocate the adoption of a code of criminal law. In 1857 followed ‘The English Constitution in the reign of Charles II,’ and in 1858 ‘Observations on the Statutes of the Reformation Parliament in the reign of Henry VIII,’ in which he presented a different view of the subject from that of the corresponding chapters of Mr. Froude's History which had then lately appeared.
Among his purely literary works may be mentioned ‘Gems of Latin Poetry’ (1851), a collection, with notes, of choice Latin verses of all periods, and illustrating remarkable actions and occurrences, ‘biography, places, and natural phenomena, the arts, and inscriptions.’ In 1858 he published ‘Martial and the Moderns,’ a translation into English prose of select epigrams of Martial arranged under heads with examples of the uses to which they had been applied.
He published various introductory lectures on diverse parts of the laws of England, and pamphlets on various subjects, such as the constitution of the new county courts, the expediency of admitting the testimony of parties to suits, and other measures of legal reform.
Amos's political and philosophical convictions were those of an advanced liberalism qualified by a profound knowledge of the constitutional development of the country and of the sole conditions under which the public improvements for which he longed and lived could alone be hopefully attempted. Though he was in constant communication with the leading reformers of his day, and was a candidate for Hull on the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832, he concerned himself little at any time with strictly party politics.
[Personal information.]
AMPHLETT, Sir RICHARD PAUL (1809–1883), judge, was the eldest son of the Rev. Richard Holmden Amphlett, lord of the manor and rector of Hadsor in Worcestershire. (The pedigree of the family from William Amphlett, lord of the manor in the time of James I, will be found in Nash's Worcestershire, i. 481.) By birth he was a native of Shropshire. He was educated at the grammar school of Brewood in Staffordshire, on leaving which he went to Cambridge, entering St. Peter's College; and in the mathematical tripos of 1831 he was placed
