Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 011.djvu/31

and intricate windings of the law of equity. He delights to balance a straw, to see a feather turn the scale, or make it even again; and divides and subdivides a scruple to the smallest fraction. He unravels the web of argument, and pieces it together again; folds it up and lays it aside, that he may examine it more at his leisure. He hugs indecision to his breast, and takes home a nice doubt or a moot-point to solace himself with it in protracted, luxurious dalliance. Delay seems in his mind to be of the very essence of justice. He no more hurries through a question than if no one was waiting for the result, and he was merely a dilettanti, fanciful judge, who played at my Lord Chancellor and busied himself with quibbles and punctilios as an idle hobby and harmless humour. The phlegm of the Chancellor's disposition gives one almost a surfeit of impartiality and candour: we are sick of the eternal poise of wilful dilatoriness; and would wish law and justice to be decided at once by a cast of the dice (as they were in Rabelais) rather than to be kept in frivolous and tormenting suspense. But there is a limit even to this extreme refinement and scrupulousness of the Chancellor's. The understanding acts only in the absence of the passions. At the approach of the loadstone the needle trembles, and points to it. The air of a political question has a wonderful tendency to brace and quicken the learned Lord's faculties. The breath of a court speedily oversets a thousand scruples, and scatters the cobwebs of his brain. The secret wish of power is a thumping make-weight, where all is so nicely balanced beforehand. In the case of a celebrated beauty and heiress, and the brother of a noble lord, the Chancellor hesitated long, and went through the forms, as usual: but who ever doubted where all this indecision would end? No man in his senses, for a single instant! We shall not press this point, which is rather a delicate one. Some persons thought that, from entertaining a fellow-feeling on the subject, the Chancellor would have been ready to favour the poet-laureate's application to the Court of Chancery for an injunction against Wat Tyler. His Lordship's sentiments on such points are not so variable; he has too much at stake. He recollected the year 1794, though Mr. Southey had forgot it!

The personal always prevails over the intellectual, where the latter is not backed by strong feeling and principle. Where remote and speculative objects do not excite an interest and passion in the mind, gross and immediate ones are sure to carry the day, even in ingenuous and well-disposed minds. The will yields necessarily to some motive or other; and where the public good, or distant consequences, excite no sympathy in the breast, either from apathy or an easiness of temperament, that shrinks from any violent effort or painful emotion, self-interest, indolence, the opinion of others, a desire to please, the sense of personal obligation, come in and fill up the void of public spirit, patriotism, and humanity. The best men in the world, in their own natural dispositions, or in private life, for this reason often become the most dangerous as public characters, from their pliancy to the headstrong passions of others, and from their having no set-off in strong moral stamina to the temptations that are held out to them, if, as is frequently the case, they are men of versatile talent or patient industry.—Lord Eldon has one of the best-natured faces in the world; it is pleasant to