HOW TO GET STRONG
fill of the fun. There they stood shaking with laughter, 'not an inch of their body free' from its grip. He was now at his own door—Castle Street, No. 39. He opened the door, and went straight to his own den; that wondrous workshop where in one year—1823 when he was fifty-two, he wrote Peveril of the Peak, Quentin Durnin, and St. Ronan's Well; besides much else."
MANSFIELD (1705–1793)
The first Scotchman who reached eminence at the English Bar was William Murray, afterwards Lord Mansfield, fourth son of Lord Stormont. A graduate of Oxford, he rose to be the most distinguished advocate in England. "He was the rival of Lord Chatham, the greatest Parliamentary orator England has ever produced—prior, at any rate, to Mr. Gladstone; highest criminal judge of the realm; over and over refusing to be Lord Chancellor; and finally Chief Justice of the King's Bench. Without political office, he directed the measures of successive cabinets; and (that far truer glory) he framed the commercial code of his country." In his Short Studies of Great Lawyers, Irving Browne says: "To him we owe the settled form and principles of the law of negotiable paper and of insurance. He was accused by some of his contemporaries of confounding equitable with legal principles; and certainly he did brush away the artificial and trivial notions of old time with 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 for the then present; and we, in our day, have not outgrown 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 then was.… Of Mansfield's oratory and style there has been but one opinion. In the judicial and senatorial manner of speaking, he is conceded to have had no equal in modern times. His eloquence mingled persuasion with manly reason; and carried conviction from which, in cooler moments, the auditor never recoiled."
And he had a helpful body, a tireless servant in his great life's work, fit companion for that mighty mind.
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