LORD HATHERLEY.

WHEN William Page Wood was a youth of nineteen he was introduced to Her late Gracious Majesty the Queen, then in her cradle, and had the honour of kissing the baby hand. He little thought at the time that forty-eight years later he would be kissing the same Royal hand on his appointment as Lord High Chancellor. The honour of this cradle presentation he owed to his father's (Alderman Wood) services to the Duke of Kent. Alderman Wood, the hop merchant, was a conspicuous figure in the days of the Regency. He espoused the cause of the injured Queen Caroline with a chivalrous ardour and devotion equal to that of Denman ; it was he who insisted on her coming from St. Omer to England to assert her rights; it was he who sat beside her in the carriage as she entered London; indeed, he made Lord Brougham, the rival protagonist of the drama, quite jealous, a jealousy which he vented by mischievously saying that A. W. (Alderman Wood) stood for "absolute wisdom," and hinting to Denman that he supposed the Queen would have Wood for her Attorney-General. It was Alderman Wood, too, who induced the Duke of Kent to remove from Brussels, where he was living owing to his embarrassments, and come to England, so that the Princess Victoria might be born on British soil, and who found the funds for this purpose. Under the auspices of a father so energetic and public spirited, twice Lord Mayor of London, and for many years the Parliamentary representative of the City of London, young Page Wood was early introduced to scenes of public life and public men, and early imbibed Whig principles. He had soon an opportunity of putting them in practice, the tyrant to be withstood being Dr. Gabell, head master of Winchester. The good and gentle Addison-so Miss Aitken tells us was the ringleader of a barring-out; the amiable Southey was expelled from

Westminster for insubordination; but it is still more strange to find the mild and religious Page Wood, while a prefect at Winchester, engaging in a rebellion so serious that it could only be quelled by the intervention of the military. The émeute ended in the expulsion of the ringleaders. Page Wood might have been spared, but he preferred to share the fate of his comrades. In losing him even the outraged Dr. Gabell had to confess that Winchester had lost one of its brightest ornaments.

"My father," says Page Wood," by virtue of his office as alderman, was bound from time to time to attend the sessions for the trial of prisoners at the Old Bailey, and he frequently took his sons with him, riding in on horseback with them from Highbury. I soon became very much interested in these trials; perhaps they gave me an early inclination for that profession to which my father, when I was about fourteen, told me I was destined. I was, however, very early shocked at the course of Old Bailey procedure. Capital offences were at that time almost the rule, and minor offences the exception. Stealing above the value of 40s. from a dwelling-house was capital. The criminals who had been capitally convicted were brought up at the close of the session and condemned wholesale. I once saw thirty or forty so condemned, some of whom were making grimaces at the judge, whilst others, who expected to be left for execution, were deeply distressed. The scenes were sometimes most painful, and the chaplain or ordinary, whose conversation I sometimes overheard when dining at the Old Bailey, but too nearly resembled him who is depicted in Jonathan Wild." Deeply impressed with "our accursed system of penal law," it was natural enough that when Page Wood was called to the Bar he did not choose the Old Bailey to practise in, but the genteel Court of Chancery instead. Leach was then Master of the Rolls, and, in his demeanour, imitated the surly Thurlow. There was, according to the testimony of an eye-witness, something significant in his mode of dispensing law. Two large fan shades were placed in such a position as not only to screen the light from the Master's eyes, but to render him invisible to the court. After the counsel, who was addressing the court, had finished and resumed his seat, there would be an awful pause for a minute or two; when at length out of the darkness which surrounded the chair of justice would come a voice distinct, awful, solemn, but with the solemnity of suppressed anger, "The bill is dismissed with costs!" No

explanations, no long series of arguments, were advanced to support the conclusion.

"I remember," says Page Wood himself, "standing in great awe of Sir John Leach; the first brief I held before him was merely to ask for payment to executors of the small arrears of an annuity (a few pounds), when the principal sum was about to be paid out on the death of the annuitant to the parties entitled in remainder. This at present is a matter of course. Then, in strictness, a separate petition, costing more than the money itself, was formally required. I simply asked, as instructed, that this might be dispensed with, and the money paid. The answer from the bench was: 'Sir, you might as well ask me to pay it to the porter at Lincoln's Inn gate.' We may contrast with this Wood's first appearance at the Bar of the House of Lords. the conclusion of his leader's speech, the House said they did not intend to hear any more counsel; the leader said "his friend Mr. Wood expected to be heard," and Lord Lyndhurst, with his usual courtesy and kind consideration for young men, said, “Oh! let us hear him.”

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It is said that Lethe flows between the Bar and the Bench, but Wood did not forget the courtesy of Lyndhurst or the churlishness of Leach. A friend who was walking home with him one day from his court, remarked on the tedious lengthiness of the speech of a junior counsel, and the unnecessary number of cases he had cited. "True," the Vice-Chancellor replied, "it was wearisome, for he assumed that I was ignorant of the A B C of the law, but I recollected how I was once snubbed by Leach when I was a junior, and I resolved to hear him out."

Slowly, but steadily, he rose until he won the SolicitorGeneralship. But at the very time when Sir William Page Wood seemed fairly to have gained a place in the front ranks, and when the great prize, for which all barristers are supposed to be contending, was at least within view, he suddenly stepped aside from the race and left it to others. And what was the reason? It was very simple, and yet it was a reason which, we venture to say, no successful lawyer ever gave before for such a course. Sir William found that the heavy labours imposed on him as Solicitor-General "so seriously interfered with the duties of domestic life and the comfort of his home, that he felt bound to relinquish his honourable position; it subjected her " (his wife) "to too much loneliness." Ambitious men would have voted

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