Eldon

“ Of middle height, well knit and active, with regular features, keen, sparkling eyes, and luxuriant hair, Eldon in the prime of life was almost the ideal of manly beauty. To please Lady Eldon he wore his hair rather long; and at her instance, on his appointment to the lord chief-justiceship, asked leave of George III to dispense with his wig out of court, but was met with the curt response, ‘No, no! I will have no innovations in my time.’ The liberty denied to the chief justice was, however, conceded to or usurped by the chancellor. ”

“ The part Eldon held in his hand had been taken from Tuell’s trunk. The dead hands seemed to cling to it with grisly jealousy. The laughter of Tuell seemed to haunt the place like the echo of a maniac’s voice. Eldon could not give any color to the lines. He could barely utter them. The company gave him his cues with equal lifelessness.
Sheila was present and read her flippancies in a voice of terror—the terror of youth before the swoop of death. Mrs. Vining muttered her cynicisms with the drear bitterness of one to whom this familiar sort of thing had happened once more. ”

“ Then Eldon came on the scene and they fell in love at once; but she was afraid of her past, and evaded him for his own sake. He misunderstood her and accused her of despising him because he was poor; and she let him think so, because she wanted him to hate her.
The audience wept with luxurious misery over her saintly double-dealing. The gum-chewer’s tears salted her pepsin and she commented: “Ain’t it awful what beasts you men are to us trusting girrls! Think of the demon that loored that girrl to her roon!” ”

“ Eldon had written, ‘from Wanley something which really surprises me. They say that Adela Waltham is going to marry Mr. Mutimer. The match is surely a very strange one. I am only fearful that it is the making of interested people, and that the poor girl herself has not had much voice in deciding her own fate. Oh, this money! Adela was worthy of better things.’
Mrs. Eldon saw her son with surprise, the more so that she divined the cause of his coming. When they had talked for a while, Hubert frankly admitted what it was that had brought him. ”

“ The young men in the Eldon families were as full of patriotic excitement as any others, George and Albert being among the first volunteers in their State, their fathers giving a ready consent, mothers and sisters also, though many and bitter tears were shed over the parting, by Ethel as well as the nearer relatives, for she had grown to love them both, especially her cousin George. ”

“ Friends thought it their duty—rightly, of course,—to inform Mr. Mutimer. I can’t say exactly who did it; but we know that Hubert Eldon is not regarded affectionately by a good many people. My dear, he has been out of England for more than a month, living—oh, such extravagance! And the moral question, too? You know—those women! Someone, they say, of European reputation; of course no names are breathed. For my part, I can’t say I am surprised. Young men, you know; and particularly young men of that kind! Well, it has cost him a pretty penny; he’ll remember it as long as he lives. ”

“ Ethel said, lifting tearful eyes to the face of Mr. George Eldon.
“Do I, my dear? I believe there is said to be a strong family resemblance among us all,” he returned. “At all events we are your father’s brothers, and therefore own uncles to all of you little ones,” he added, stooping to caress them in turn, as his brother was doing. ”

“ There is nothing whatever dishonourable in his position.’
‘Not in sponging on a rich old plebeian, a man he despises, and living in idleness at his expense?’
‘I don’t believe Mr. Eldon does anything of the kind. Since his brother’s death he has had a sufficient income of his own, so mother says.’
‘Sufficient income of his own! Bah! Five or six hundred a year; likely he lives on that! Besides, haven’t they soaped old Mutimer into leaving them all his property? The whole affair is the best illustration one could possibly have of what aristocrats are brought to in a democratic age. ”

“ But, though quite unable to understand how great a Chancellor Lord Eldon was, I am quite able to estimate how great a poet he was, also how great a wit. Here is a poem by that eminent person. Doubtless he regarded it as a wonder of happy versification, as well as instinct with the most convulsing fun. It is intended to set out in a metrical form the career of a certain judge, who went up as a poor lad from Scotland to England, but did well at the bar, and ultimately found his place upon the bench. ”

“ Near at hand there grew a silver birch Hubert Eldon, on one of the occasions when he talked here with Adela and Letty, had by chance let his eyes wander from Adela to the birch tree, and his fancy, just then active among tender images, suggested a likeness between that graceful, gleaming stem with its delicately drooping foliage and the sweet-featured girl who stood before him with her head bowed in unconscious loveliness. As the silver birch among the trees of the wood, so was Adela among the men and women of the world. ”

“ No doubt, Lord Eldon was a wise and sagacious man as judge and statesman, though as wit and poet he was almost an idiot. So with other great men. It is easy to remember occasions on which great men have done very foolish things. There never was a truer hero nor a greater commander than Lord Nelson ”

“ But the lively prattle of his sister and their dainty cousin on topics of interests common only to girls, bored him and he soon found himself becoming interested in the conversation of his elders.
"You say Jim Grey's son-in-law is running for postmaster?" the guest of honor was asking.
"So I hear," replied his nephew Eldon in his cold, quiet way.
"You don't intend to sign his petition, Eldon?" demanded the old man, his suspicion aroused by the matter-of-fact answer of his nephew.
"Oh, business is business, Uncle," retorted the [31] younger man, rather abruptly. ”

“ George Eldon, seating himself and looking very hard, with something of a frown on his face, at Ethel. “Come here, child, and tell me all about it.”
Ethel obeyed, wiping her eyes and saying pleadingly, “Please, uncle, don’t be angry with me. I—I can’t bear to be such an expense to Uncle Albert now when I’m getting so old, and so——”
“Ay, yes, very big and very old,” he returned, taking her hand and drawing her to him; “so big and so old that it must cost a great deal to feed and dress you. ”

“ Great Ages To return to Longevity. The following additional instances are mostly of our own time:
Among Lawyers, Francis Maseres, fifty years Cursitor-Baron of the Court of Exchequer, died 1824, at the age of 93: he was a ripe classical scholar, and one of the ablest mathematicians of his day. The Eldon family present three noteworthy examples: Mr. Scott, the Newcastle merchant, father of Lord Stowell and the Earl of Eldon, died 1800, at the age of 92: the two eminent sons, Stowell, 1836, at 91, and Eldon, 1838, at 87. Lord Plunket, the statesman and lawyer, who died 1854, had reached 90. ”

“ Good-by till dinner time, my dear;” and with the last word he left the room.
“Dear me! as if we hadn’t children enough of our own!” exclaimed Mrs. Eldon in a petulant tone, and impatiently tossing aside her book as the sound of her husband’s footsteps died away in the distance. “Albert needn’t talk as if they were to be no trouble to me. Who else is to do the shopping for their clothes, decide how they are to be made and find somebody to do the work? for of course if they don’t look all right, people will talk and say we don’t treat them as well as we do our own.” ”

“ Sly hits were made against Lord Eldon, the keeper of the king’s conscience, for ordering such a mass at a period when he was in the habit of toasting the Protestant ascendency. Many persons—the most of them, it is to be hoped, moved by praiseworthy sympathies—went from London to be present at the ceremony. It was solemn and dignified. Distinguished persons, bearing familiar names of the old Jacobite times, were present. Marshal Macdonald and the Duke of Fitz-James were amongst them. ”

“ She is understood to have spent much labour in the study of a new part, which she is about to introduce to us of the modern Babylon. But Albion, it is whispered, possesses other attractions for her besides appreciative audiences. In brief, though she will of course appear under the old name, she will in reality have changed it for one of another nationality before presenting herself in the radiance of the footlights. The happy man is Mr. Hubert Eldon, late of Wanley Manor. ”

“ First of all, Godfrey Eldon marries Mutimer’s daughter; you are at liberty to believe, if you like, that he would have married her just the same if she hadn’t had a penny. The old fellow is flattered. They see the hold they have, and stick to him like leeches. All for want of money, of course. Our aristocrats begin to see that they can’t get on without money nowadays; they can’t live on family records, and they find that people won’t toady to them in the old way just on account of their name. ”

“ He still felt sorry for poor Tuell. The grief of the wife whom he had met at the train and taken to the undertaker’s shop where Tuell rested had torn his heart as with claws. He had told her all things beautiful of Tuell. He had wept to see her weep. He wept his heart clean as a sheep’s heart.
As Villon said, “The dead go quick.” Eldon was ashamed to be so merciless, but in spite of himself ambition blazed up in him. He was a comedian. Batterson had told him so. The house had told him so. Sheila had murmured, “You’re splendid.”
And now he was a comedian with a screamingly funny rôle. ”

“ And all the while nature was rendering her more ready to command love from without, less ready to withstand love from within. She was becoming more and more of an actress. But still faster and still more was she becoming a woman.
While Sheila was drafting herself a future, Eldon was gnashing his teeth in a pillory of inaction. He could make no step forward and he could not back out. He had taken cheap and nasty lodgings in the same boarding-house with Vincent Tuell, who added to his depression by his constant distress. Tuell could not sleep nights or days ”

“ By the time of Lord Eldon equity had become fixed, and the judges, like their brethren in the common law courts, strictly followed the precedents. Henceforward chancery and common law courts have exhibited the anomaly of two co-ordinate sets of tribunals, empowered to deal with the same matters, and compelled to proceed in many cases on wholly different principles. The court of chancery could in most cases prevent a person from taking advantage of a common law right, not approved of by its own system. ”

“ Lord Halsbury resumed the position in 1886 and held it until 1892 and again from 1895 to 1905, his tenure of the office, broken only by the brief Liberal ministries of 1886 and 1892–1895, being longer than that of any lord chancellor since Lord Eldon. In 1898 he was created earl of Halsbury and Viscount Tiverton. Among Conservative lord chancellors Lord Halsbury must always hold a high place, his grasp of legal principles and mastery in applying them being pre-eminent among the judges of his day. ”

“ There is another vacant at York (if not filled up) , in the gift of the archbishop; but I don’t know the value—no very great sum, I believe.’ So very illogical a person [Pg 241] was as unsuccessful as he deserved to be. Lord Nelson’s chaplain on board the Vanguard at the Nile fared better, and merited so to fare. On Nelson’s application, Lord Eldon thought himself bound in public duty to pass over his own personal wishes and also the strong claims which individuals had upon him to be attentive to their welfare. Nelson’s chaplain at the Nile had a prior claim: and the Rev. Mr. ”

“ According to Romilly, Leach had ‘great facility of apprehension, considerable powers of argumentation, and remarkably clear and perspicuous elocution,’ but was extremely wanting in knowledge as a lawyer, and in judgment was ‘more deficient than any man possessed of so clear an understanding that I ever met with’ (Memoirs, iii. 216–17) . Leach got through his cases with remarkable speed. The chancery court under Lord Eldon was called the Court of Oyer sans Terminer, and the vice-chancellor's the Court of Terminer sans Oyer. ”

“ English statesman, was born at Preston in 1835, the son of Edward Chaddock Gorst, who took the name of Lowndes on succeeding to the family estate in 1853. He graduated third wrangler from St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1857, and was admitted to a fellowship. After beginning to read for the bar in London, his father’s illness and death led to his sailing to New Zealand, where he married in 1860 Mary Elizabeth Moore. ”

“ I am unalterably opposed to any system of elections which will prevent the people from putting candidates in nomination at any time and voting for them by a printed ballot up to the very last moment before the closing of the polls on election day. This is an inherent right under our free institutions, which the people will never knowingly surrender. ”

“ Almost every mark which a voter could make or neglect to make has been discussed in the state courts. Although the statutes regulating the manner in which a voter shall indicate his choice are held mandatory, yet through all the decisions is the theory that a voter should not be disfranchised if he has made an honest effort to comply with the requisites of the law. ”

“ The only persons who can have an interest in elections as they are, are the leaders and managers, whose power depends upon their successes in manipulating the ballot so that the suffrage will express, not the will of the people, but the success of their schemes. ”

“ Those in favor of helping the ignorant elector declare, first, that he has as much interest in voicing his needs by means of the ballot as the educated, and to deny him assistance is to disfranchise him; secondly, that if he votes without assistance, he has to do so in a haphazard way and may vote for the wrong candidates; thirdly, that there is little danger of corruption, as the election officers are bound to secrecy. ”