was entranced by the art of the speaker, and all the members, it is said, remained to the end. It is within our own knowledge that Mr. Huskisson, expecting a dull debate on law, had invited a party to dinner, and, unmindful of guests and dinner, could not resist the fascination of this wonderful display. The debate was resumed on a subsequent day, when Mr. Brougham's resolution for an address to the Crown, praying that inquiry should be made into the origin, progress, and termination of actions at law and matters connected therewith, and into the state of the law regarding the transfer of real property, was carried unanimously. This address led to the appointment of two commissions-the Common Law and Real Property Commission. Persons of eminence in their different departments were selected for the purpose, and it is to their labours that we owe the most efficient of the reforms which have since been made. Lord Eldon was gone; the sagacious, the enlightened, the impartial Lord Lyndhurst held the Great Seal, and but for his honest concurrence probably little would have been effected. It was the coming of the hour and the man,' and instead of cavils and reproaches of rash and illconsidered changes, the views of Mr. Brougham were met with equal acuteness and candour. The Solicitor-General (Sir N. Tindal) ended the speech which he made upon Mr. Brougham's resolution by holding out with the openness and simplicity which formed the basis of his character the hand of fellowship: 6 6 Whether my honourable and learned friend will receive me as a fellow-labourer in the same vineyard as himself, or whether he will consider me as too lukewarm to afford him any effectual support in the consummation of his plans, it is not for me to say; but if I am thought worthy to be his fellow-labourer, I declare that though I shall wish to preserve the plant under which my ancestors have slept, and under which we ourselves have flourished so long, I will not be slow to remove the tendrils which have sprung from it, when I am convinced that instead of advancing they retard its growth. If time shall have caused it to send forth superfluous and unnecessary branches, no one will use the pruning knife with more unrelenting severity!' Well did he keep his word. Nor from that time was there any hesitation in Lord Lyndhurst throughout the whole of the three periods during which he held the Great Seal, either in introducing or forwarding all well considered measures of law reform. In 1830 Mr. Brougham became himself Lord Chancellor. Sydney Smith, who was heart and soul a law reformer, and when the reform of Parliament cry first arose, was a Parliamentary reformer also, drew in his vigorous though exaggerated style style a picture of the energy of the new head of the Courts of Equity. The extract from the speech which the witty divine delivered on the occasion is curious as a sample of the tone of the times: 'Then, look at the gigantic Brougham, sworn in at twelve o'clock, and before six p.m. he has a Bill on the table abolishing the abuses of a court which has been the curse of England for centuries. For twentyfive long years did Lord Eldon sit in that court, surrounded with misery and sorrow, which he never held up a finger to alleviate. The widow and the orphan cried to him as vainly as the town-crier when he offers a small reward for a full purse. The bankrupt of the court became the lunatic of the court. Estates mouldered away and mansions fell down, but the fees came in and all was well; but in an instant the iron mace of Brougham shivered to atoms this House of Fraud and of Delay. And this is the man who will help to govern you-who bottoms his reputation on doing good to you-who knows that to reform abuses is the safest basis of fame and the surest instrument of power-who uses the highest gifts of reason and the most splendid efforts of genius to rectify all those abuses which all the genius and talent of the profession have hitherto been employed to justify and protect. Look you to Brougham, and turn you to that side where he waves his long and lean finger, and mark well that face which nature has marked so forcibly-which dissolves pensions, turns jobbers into honest men, scares away the plunderer of the public, and is a terror to him who doeth evil to the people!' Sydney Smith adds, in a note to this passage published in his works, that Lord Lyndhurst is an exception to those eminent lawyers whom he thus describes as being willing to perpetuate the abuses of the Court of Chancery.' Although all which was prophesied by Mr. Smith did not come to pass, and we suspect there are still some delays in Chancery, and that the remedy is not even now very cheap, yet Lord Brougham, while in office, pursued his career with unabated zeal, and never for a moment upheld in power the abuses which he had denounced in opposition. In 1848, just twenty years after his great speech, Lord Brougham took a review of all that had been done during the interval, and showed what still remained to be accomplished. He considered not only the laws which required amendment, but the mode of their construction, pointing out the careless manner in which bills were framed, together with the errors arising from inadvertent or ill-considered alterations, and supporting what nine years afterwards was suggested by the Statute Law Commissioners -the appointment of one or more persons whose duty it should be to draw Acts of Parliament and watch over the changes made during their progress. He discussed at the same time the much vexed question of a Minister of Justice. Without entering on the difficult point of the policy of the latter proposal, in favour of which the present Lord Chancellor of Ireland carried an address to the Crown, we agree both with Lord Brougham and the Statute Law Commission, that the question of framing bills by proper officers, so as to improve the present style of our legislation, is a subject of great importance, upon which the decision should not be delayed. The whole subject is under the consideration of a Committee of the House of Commons; and if we might venture to make a suggestion, we would recommend that the principle of any new law should be debated before the actual preparation of the bill, and that resolutions containing the heads of the measure should be first discussed. This probably would prevent many serious alterations during the progress of the bill through Parliament, and would enable the draftsman better to see his way in the construction of the measure." * During the period that Lord Brougham held the Great Seal he appointed Commissioners to make a digest of the Criminal Law, both unwritten and statute, and to consider the expediency of consolidating the whole remainder of the Statute Law. Amongst the persons employed in this great undertaking, we may name the present Mr. Justice Wightman, the late Mr. Starkie, and Mr. Amos. They completed the digest of the Criminal Law, and made a very elaborate Report, recommending the consolidation of the whole mass of the Statute Law, and pointing out the different plans which might be adopted. Lord Brougham, however, was no longer in office; and although more than once he brought forward the subject in the House of Lords, it was hopeless without the aid of the Ministry to pass such a measure. Lord Derby's Government, at the suggestion of Lord Brougham, first commenced the task in earnest, and Lord St. Leonards introduced a bill comprising that portion of the digest which related to offences against the person. This, when Lord St. Leonards left office, was taken up by his successor Lord Cranworth. Other bills containing a consolidation of the statute law relating to crime were prepared under the direction of the Statute Law Board, and were to have been introduced by the late Government, when Parliament was dissolved. They have been *The want of a public officer to revise bills is particularly felt by any member of either House, not a member of the Government, who may wish to bring forward any measure. He must either prepare the bill himself, or at his own cost procure the assistance of a lawyer who has made this particular and very difficult branch of the law his peculiar study. again brought in by the present Attorney-General, Sir Fitzroy Kelly, and are again doomed to be suspended for a while by the dissolution of Parliament. Lord Brougham had to wait sixteen years before his scheme for local courts became law. Let us hope that he may live to see not only a clear digest of our Criminal Law, including procedure, but a consolidation into some five or six volumes of the endless mass of conflicting general statutes. Is this too much to hope, or are we for ever to go on floundering through the maze of contradictory and obscure enactments? Some delay has taken place in the execution of the larger project, which, we think, may be fairly put to the account of the difficulties inherent in the subject: the present Commissioners, however, have, for the first time at least, made a beginning: 'We are well aware,' they say at the close of their Third Report, of the great difficulties which surround the task confided to usdifficulties which no one can appreciate who has not had personal experience of them; but we trust that we may at least claim the credit of having actually commenced and even made an important progress in a work which others have only recommended.' It would be impossible here to trace Lord Brougham's progress step by step through his half century of exertions, or to attempt even a list of the bills he has brought in. Those who wish to take a detailed view of the gigantic task already achieved must consult the book itself. The first head in the volume is (I.), Slave Trade, and this section contains the earliest triumph of Lord Brougham as a legislator; the second is (II.) the law of Libel and Slander. In 1843 was passed Lord Campbell's Act (afterwards amended), allowing, in cases of private libel, a justification on the ground of the truth of the matters charged, coupled with an allegation that it was for the public good that the publication was made. In 1816, and afterwards in 1830, a similar measure had been introduced into the House of Commons by Lord Brougham, who was assisted by Sir N. Tindal in the preparation of this bill. There was, however, this difference between Lord Brougham's] measure and Lord Campbell's, that Lord Brougham took away the power of filing ex officio informations, and made no distinction between private and public offences. He introduced many other important provisions in favour of the subject, especially taking away the right to a special jury, except when both parties agreed-provisions which were not adopted by Lord Campbell. (III.) Education and Charities, upon which we have touched already. (IV.) Chancery, Privy Council, and Patent Law. his head contains 3 contains many important Acts relating to the reform of the Court of Chancery, such as the Act abolishing thirteen great sinecures in the gift of the Chancellor, two of which, worth 30007. a year, were vacant when the Act passed; the bill establishing the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council; and the bill for giving remedies by way of a declaratory suit. The latter is a subject of the deepest importance, and has often been brought forward by Lord Brougham, whose practical knowledge of the law of Scotland enabled him fully to appreciate its value. The main object is to enable a party, by instituting proceedings against adverse claimants, to establish his right, or, at least, to have it tried and determined. As it is, a party may not through his whole life be able to ascertain what his rights are, unless his adversary commences a suit. A step has been made in the right direction in an Act passed during the last session, allowing persons to take proceedings to establish their legitimacy. (V.) Real Property. This contains all the bills passed on the recommendation of the Real Property Commissioners, including the bill for the abolition of the monstrous and costly absurdity of fines and recoveries; the bill for the improvement of the law of inheritance, removing the absurdity that the father could not inherit of the son in any case; the shortening the time for proceedings at law; the Wills' Act, in which many of the niceties and difficulties of the law relating to land were removed, and wills relating to real and personal estate were put on the same footing, together with many other important measures, which we have not space to particularize. Under this head also must be included amendments in common law procedures, particularly as regards special pleading. Those who may be so fortunate as to have seen a Dialogue in the Shades on Special Pleading,' privately printed, the work of one of the most genial wits at the English bar, will be able to form some idea of the mysteries and absurdities relating to this abstruse science. On the proposal for a reform of the system in recent days, it was asked, says this writer, for the first time, whether it was essential to the administration of justice that the simplest statements of the litigant parties of the facts out of which their disputes arose, should be governed by rules of so complicated and artificial a nature as to require the labour of a life to understand them? Was it creditable to the law that suits should be determined upon points of such refined and curious technicality as to render it utterly impossible to explain to a defeated plaintiff or defendant why judgment had been given against him? Lord Lyndhurst afforded |