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ART. III.-THE LIFE OF SIR SAMUEL ROMILLY.

Memoirs of the Life of Sir Samuel Romilly, written by himself; with a Selection from his Correspondence. Edited by his Sons. In Three Volumes, 8vo. London. 1840. SIR Samuel Romilly was to the criminal law of England, what Clarkson was to the slave trade, Howard to prison discipline, or Lord Brougham to popular education. He kept his name before the public during many years by a series of persevering efforts to blot out some peculiarly objectionable enactments from the statute book; he was the acknowledged leader of the equity bar; he had held a high office, was reasonably looking forward to the very highest, and occupied a distinguished position in the Whig party; who, to do them justice, are ever ready to make the most of every species of merit or celebrity that may chance to be discovered amongst their proselytes. Yet his fame was beginning to die out, like that of Horner, or that of Mackintosh before the recent publication of his son, and people were beginning to ask what Romilly had actually done to make his authority still quoted with such unfeigned tokens of respect by his cotemporaries, when the question was opportunely answered by this book; which, however, it is a palpable misnomer to call Memoirs of his Life, with the Selections from his Correspondence, for the narrative occupies just one-twelfth part of the three volumes, and the correspondence is very far indeed from meriting the appellation of select.

Most of the letters addressed to Mr. Roget, for example, are filled with common-place opinions on common-place topics, and the labour of wading through them is ill repaid by occasional bits of personal history, or a few striking observations on the great men and measures of the day,— Burke, Pitt, Fox, Lord North, the American and French revolutions, the Gordon riots, and parliamentary reform. The diary of his parliamentary life is not open to the same objection it forms the most authentic record of his conduct and opinions at a period when they were exercising a marked influence; and we cannot assent to the doctrine that delicacy required any passages of it to be suppressed. At the same

time, it not merely authorises but challenges the most unreserved discussion, and his sons have now clearly no reason to complain, should their father's character be subjected to the most trying analysis with the view of finding out the key to the many harsh judgments he has passed on his competitors, or the many confined notions he entertained regarding English laws and institutions.

Sir Samuel Romilly was born on the 1st March, 1751. He was descended from a respectable family in the south of France. His grandfather gave up his country and his patrimony rather than submit to the persecutions to which the professors of the reformed religion were exposed during the latter years of Louis the Fourteenth's reign, and set up business in the neighbourhood of London as a wax-bleacher. He died poor, leaving a large family unprovided for. The youngest son, Peter, the father of Sir Samuel, was apprenticed to a jeweller in Broad Street, and appears to have made himself a thorough master of his business, for we subsequently find him mentioned as one of the leading jewellers of the day. He fell in love with the sister of his fellow-apprentice, Garnault, and after a protracted opposition on the part of her family, was united to her. But her health and spirits had received a fatal shock from their unkindness, and she remained through life incapable of taking an active share in the management of the household, or the education of her children.

"We were brought up principally by a very kind and pious female relation of my mother's, a Mrs. Margaret Facquier, who had lived in our family ever since my mother's marriage. She taught us to read, and to read with intelligence; though the books in which we were taught were ill suited to our age. The Bible, the Spectator, and an English translation of Telemachus, are those which I recollect our having in most frequent use. But this kind relation had too bad a state of health to attend to us constantly. During the last forty years of her life, it seldom happened that many weeks passed without her being confined to her bed, or at least to her room. The care of us, upon these occasions, devolved on a female servant of the name of Mary Evans, who was ill qualified to give us instruction or to cultivate our understandings; but

whose tender and affectionate nature, whose sensibility at the sufferings of others, and earnest desire to relieve them to the utmost extent of her little means, could hardly fail to improve the hearts of those who were under her care.

"It is commonly said to be the happy privilege of youth to feel no misfortunes but the present, to be careless of the future, and forgetful of the past. That happy privilege I cannot recollect having ever enjoyed. In my earliest infancy, my imagination was alarmed and my fears awakened by stories of devils, witches, and apparitions; and they had a much greater effect upon me than is even usual with children; at least I judge so, from their effect being of a more than usual duration. The images of terror, with which those tales abound, infested my imagination very long after I had discarded all belief in the tales themselves, and in the notions on which they are built; and even now, although I have been accustomed for many years to pass my evenings and my nights in solitude, and without even a servant sleeping in my chambers, I must, with some shame, confess that they are sometimes very unwelcome intruders upon my thoughts. I often recollect, and never without shuddering, a story which, in my earliest childhood (for my memory hardly reaches beyond it), I overheard, as I lay in bed, related by an old woman who was employed about our house, of a servant murdering his master; and particularly that part of it where the murderer, with a knife in his hand, had crept, in the dead of the night, to the side of the bed in which his master lay asleep, and when, as from a momentary compunction, he was hesitating before he executed his bloody purpose, he on a sudden heard a deep hollow voice whispering close to his ear in a commanding tone, that he should accomplish his design!'

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"But it was not merely such extravagant stories that disturbed my peace; as dreadful an impression was made on me by relations of murders and acts of cruelty. The prints, which I found in the lives of the martyrs and Newgate Calendar, have cost me many sleepless nights. My dreams too were disturbed by the hideous images which haunted my imagination by day. I thonght myself present at executions, murders, and scenes of blood; and I have often lain in bed

agitated by my terrors, equally afraid of remaining awake in the dark, and of falling asleep to encounter the horrors of my dreams. Often have I in my evening prayers to God be-, sought him, with the utmost fervour, to suffer me to pass the 'night undisturbed by horrid dreams."

Another fear which haunted him was that of his father's death:

"I remember once accompanying him to the theatre on a night when Garrick acted. The play was Zara, and it was followed by the farce of Lethe. The inimitable and various powers of acting, which were displayed by that admirable performer in both those pieces, could not for a moment drive from my mind the dismal idea which haunted me. In the aged Lusignan I saw what my father in a few years would be, tottering on the brink of the grave: and when in the farce the old man desires to drink the waters of Lethe that he may forget how old he is, I thought that the same idea must naturally present itself to my father; that he must see as clearly as I did that his death could not be at the distance of many years; and that, notwithstanding his apparent cheerfulness, that idea must often prey upon his mind, and poison his happiness more even than it did mine. I looked at his countenance as he was sitting by me, persuaded myself that I observed a change in his features, conjectured that the same painful reflections had occurred to him as had to me, repented of having entered the theatre, and returned from it as sad and as dejected as I could have done from a funeral."

The old adage, "the child is father to the man," was never more strikingly exemplified. We here see plain traces of the over-wrought sensibility and disordered imagination which shortened his life.

He gives a very bad account of his first schoolmaster, who pretended to teach Latin without knowing a syllable of the language, and treated the young Romillys with marked distinction on account of the superior gentility of their father's trade to that of the barbers, butchers and bakers, who formed the principal support of the academy. He nevertheless continued in it for several years without learning anything but writing, arithmetic, and the rules of the French grammar. His father was anxious that he should learn Latin, to fit him

for the profession of the law, i. e. for that of an attorney, to which the son contracted an insuperable aversion from an accidental circumstance

"But, unfortunately for the success of his plan, there was one attorney, and only one, among his acquaintance, a certain Mr. Liddel, who lived in Threadneedle Street, in the city, and was, I believe, a man eminent enough in his line. He was a shortish fat man, with a ruddy countenance, which always shone as if besmeared with grease; a large wig which sat loose from his head; his eyes constantly half shut and drowsy; all his motions slow and deliberate; and his words slabbered out as if he had not exertion enough to articulate. His dark and gloomy house was filled with dusty papers and voluminous parchment deeds; and in his meagre library I did not see a single volume which I should not have been deterred by its external appearance from opening. The idea of a lawyer and of Mr. Liddel were so identified in my mind, that I looked upon the profession with disgust, and entreated my father to think of any way of life for me but that; and, accordingly, all thoughts of my being an attorney were given up as well by my father as myself."

The next plan was to make a merchant of him through the instrumentality of Sir Samuel Fludyer, a near connection; and as a preparatory step, it was thought fit that he should acquire the art or science of book-keeping.

"A master was accordingly provided for me. I was equipped with a set of journals, waste books, bill books, ledgers, and I know not what; and I passed some weeks in making careful entries of ideal transactions, keeping a register of the times when fictitious bills of exchange would become due, and posting up imaginary accounts. I should have lost more time than I did in this ridiculous employment, if my instructor, Mr. Johnson, as he was called, (but whose name was perhaps as fictitious as those of my correspondents at Amsterdam, at Smyrna, and in both the Indies, and to whose merits my father had been introduced only by an advertisement in a newspaper,) had not suddenly decamped to avoid his creditors. Events which soon afterwards happened made it unnecessary to look out for a new professor of the mercantile science. Sir Samuel Fludyer died of an apoplexy; Sir Thomas did not

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