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jury and scientific observers. Certain members of the Yorke family have recently contradicted the statement that the second Lord Chancellor of their house perished by his own hand; but their contradiction in no way affects the balance of testimony previously before the world. It is noteworthy that though the second Lord Hardwicke, in his Private Memorial' concerning his brother's death (written something less than a year after the fatal occurrence, and when the belief in the imputed suicide was universal), enters minutely into the circumstances of his last intercourse with his brother, he neither states any facts that disprove the painful accusation, nor ventures to express any opinion as to the nature of the death. It is not credible that had Lord Hardwicke believed his brother's death due to natural causes, he would have omitted to state that belief in this important paper.

By conferring on Charles Yorke's son the peerage, which, through non-completion of the patent, had fallen from the Chancellor's dying hand, George III. would have done much to remove a dark cloud from the memory of a man who certainly died under circumstances that gave his offspring a special title to the royal favour. The king, however, abstained from ennobling the younger line of the house of Yorke; and the patent for the Barony of Morden became waste paper. "After the menacing language," says Lord Hardwicke, in the Private Memorial,' "used in the closet to compel Mr. Yorke's acceptance, and the loss wh the king sustained by his death at that critical juncture, the most unprejudiced and dispassionate were surprised at the little or rather no notice that was taken of his family; the not making an offer to complete the peerage was neither palliated nor justified in their opinion. It was due to the manes of the departed, and from every motive of humanity and decorum. Lord Hillsborough told a friend of mine indeed that the K. had, soon after his death, spoken of him with tears in his eyes, and enquired after his family; but it would surely not have misbecome his M", conscious of the whole of his behaviour to an able, faithful, and despairing subject, to have expressed that concern in a more particular way." Perhaps the sovereign's conduct followed from the view which he took of the Chancellor's death.

As to the cause of that death the writer of these pages offers no personal opinion.

Having briefly noticed the chief evidence concerning the matter he leaves the question with his readers, addressing to them Lord Tenterden's dying words, "And now, gentlemen of the jury, you will consider your verdict."

THE

CHAPTER LXXV.

LEGAL HAUNTS.

'HE educated explorer of old cities has frequent occasion to lament his want of a complete chain of historic associations with the picturesque buildings which he surveys, and the antique quarters through which he wanders; and notwithstanding the zeal and success with which antiquarians have laboured to tell the story of every nook and corner of London, this want is felt as often and keenly in the English capital as in cities which have received much less attention from artists and students. In Aldgate and Bishopsgate Street, and the purlieus of the chief thoroughfares of "old London," the searcher after historic relics comes upon the remains of colleges, palaces, hostelries, with each of which he has some few historic associations, but of no one of which he is able to trace the story step by step from the past to the present. The monastery has become a hiding-place for thieves; the palace is a block of cheap lodging-houses; the hostelry in which gallants and wits contributed to the life of feudal London, is a merchant's warehouse-but of the degrees by which the change in each case has been wrought tradition says but little, and history almost nothing.

Of the Inns of Court a chief, if not the greatest, charm is the perfect continuity of their historic associations through a long course of time. This charm they possess in common with all old colleges; but in their case it is stronger and more conspicuous than in most collegiate buildings-(those even of Oxford and Cambridge being included in the survey)-by reason of the very great number of remarkable men who have dwelt within their bounds, whilst exercising direct and personal influence on the action of the nation. of the sixteenth century to the middle of the

From the heart

eighteenth the

Four Inns contained so much of what was strongest in the intellectual, and brightest in the social life of England, that it is impossible for an educated person to pace their courts and terraces.in meditative mood, and be in no way affected by the memories of the men who have walked, and of the scenes which have been enacted, on the same ground in past time.

To those who are familiar with England's life from the days of Elizabeth, the open space between Verulam Buildings and Raymond Buildings, Gray's Inn, is something more than a deserted tree-garden, serviceable as an exercise-ground for a few children and nursemaids, one or two corps of volunteer riflemen, and a score or more barristers who like to smoke in the open air. Its umbrageous avenue and raised walk recall the labours of Mr. Francis Bacon and Mr. Wilbraham, who laid out the ground and the money appropriated by the benchers to its adornment, with equal economy and taste; and the sight of the trees in Mecklenburgh Square, as beheld from the elevated ridge at the northern extremity of the college-garden brings to mind Bacon's terrace and its summer-house, which commanded a view of Highgate and Hampstead. It is the same garden in which the beauties and gallants of Charles II.'s London used to ogle each other and flirt every Sunday afternoon-pretty Fanny Butler being in her brief day the belle of the ground, and rousing the admiration of Samuel Pepys, who was wont to express his delight at the lady's beauty with a fervid candour that was by no means agreeable to the fair young wife upon his arm.* Some of the very same trees which have cano

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* Under the merry monarch there was abundance of flirtation in Gray's Inn Gardens on each of the six secular days; but Sunday was the day of grand promenade, the open-air assemblies in summer-time taking place immediately after afternoon service. On June 17, 1660, young Sam Pepys wrote in his diary:— '(Lord's Day.) Again to Mr. Mossum's; a good sermon. This day the organs did begin to play at White Hall before the king. After dinner to Mr. Mossum's again, and so in the garden, and heard Chippel's father preach, that was page to the Protector. By the window that I stood at sat Mrs. Butler the great beauty. Mr. Edward and I into Gray's Inn walks, and saw many beauties." A year later (June 23, 1661) the young Justice of the Peace-still "mightily pleased" with his honourable position, "though wholly ignorant in the duties of a Justice of the Peace"-recorded another visit to Gray's Inn on a Sunday afternoon. "After dinner to church all of us, and had a very good sermon of a stranger, and so I and the young company to walk first to Graye's Inn walks, where great store of gallants, but above all the

pied Queen Victoria's "Devil's Own," threw shade on the young men who loitered throughout hot June days in the gardens with Butler and Cleveland. On the same broad walk where law-students may still saunter whensoever they please, John Evelyn's friend, Mr. Palmer of Gray's Inn, the ingenious mechanician, often paced up and down, considering the qualities of the latest addition to his collection of " telescopes and mathematical instruments, choice pictures, and other curiosities;" or devising some new contrivance for the improvement of that marvellous clock which roused the diarist's wonder and enthusiasm; or listening to Evelyn's description of the museum of natural curiosities belonging to Mr. Charlton of the Middle Temple, which collection eventually passed by purchase into the possession of Sir Hans Sloane. How many similar associations has every bookish Londoner with "the walks" of Lincoln's Inn, where the ambassador from Morocco was received by the benchers on March 4, 1681-2, and where Steele liked to plan his essays, sitting one day under branches that still remain to us, on another reclining beneath one of those trees which were removed to make way for the new hall-an alteration that occasioned Sir George Rose's lines

"The trees of yore

Are seen no more,

Unshaded now the garden lies;

May the red bricks

Which here we fix

Be lasting as our equities.

ladies I there saw, or did ever see, Mrs. Frances Butler (Monsieur L'Impertinent's sister) is the greatest beauty." On this occasion Mrs. Pepys seems not to have accompanied her husband; but like all modish ladies of her time she was a frequenter of the Inns-of-Court pleasure-grounds. Under date June 10, 1660, Pepys says, "(Lord's Day) :-At my father's found my wife, and to walk with her in Lincoln's-Inn walks." As a contrast to the nimble, bright-eyed, loquacious governmentclerk may be taken the courtly, well-descended, gentle John Evelyn, already a man of middle age when Pepys married his young bride. As an official person, a man about town, and a gossiping diarist, Evelyn had points in common with Pepys; but from the crowds of gallants who thronged the promenades of the Inns of Courts in Charles II.'s time no two persons could be chosen, more dissimilar in appearance, manner, and tone than these two men whose private journals throw a flood of light on the social life of our ancestors.

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