Lyndhurst

“ As we leave Brockenhurst we find ourselves more and more in the Forest. The road to Lyndhurst is one long avenue of trees—beeches with their smooth trunks, oaks growing in groups, with here and there long lawns stretching far away into distant woods. ”

“ He is eloquent without labour, and convincing without vehemence—in many respects a master of oratory. In his eighty-third year, his polished intellect has lost none of its lustre. It has all the vigour, in debate, which it possessed half a century ago. Lord Lyndhurst at first took side with the Liberal party in politics, but he soon became a follower of Sir Robert Peel, and with that Minister he remained to the last. ”

“ In 1829, when Lyndhurst was occupying the woolsack for the first time, and Eldon was longing to recover the seals, the latter presented a petition from the Tailors' Company at Glasgow against Catholic Belief.
"What!" asked Lord Lyndhurst from the woolsack, in a low voice, "do the tailors trouble themselves about such measures?" Whereto, with unaccustomed quickness, the old Tory of the Tories retorted, "No wonder; you can't suppose that tailors like turncoats." ”

“ Lord Lyndhurst used to maintain that it was one of the chief duties of a judge to render it disagreeable to counsel to talk nonsense. Jeffreys in his milder moments no doubt salved his conscience with the same doctrine, when he recalled how, after elating him with a compliment, he struck down the rising junior with "Lord, sir! you must be cackling too. We told you, Mr. Bradbury, your objection was very ingenious; that must not make you troublesome: you cannot lay an egg, but you must be cackling over it." ”

“ So that the fact seems to have been, William, finding this tract in a barren state and yielding but little profit, and being strongly attached to the pleasures of the chase, converted it into a royal forest, without being guilty of those violences to the inhabitants of which Henry of Huntingdon, Malmesbury, Walter Mapes, and others complain."
Of this great New Forest, Lyndhurst was made the capital and the administrative centre, and such it is still. In Domesday Book we read: "The King himself holds Lyndhurst, which appertained to Amesbury, which is of the King's farm." ”

“ Klapka will be commemorated and renowned in history as one beloved by the people, venerated by the nobility; whose voice was listened to attentively by the magistrate, enthusiastically by the soldier. The fame of Lord Lyndhurst is ephemeral, confined to the Court of Chancery and the House of Peers; dozens have shared it in each, and have gone to dinner and oblivion. Those, and those alone, are great men whose works or words are destined to be the heirlooms of many generations. God places them where time passes them without erasing their footsteps. Kings can never make them. ”

“ Wellington.’ When Sir Robert Peel was called, in August 1841, to form a ministry on the defeat of the Melbourne administration, he at once named as his chancellor Lord Lyndhurst, with whom he had for years ‘been on the most confidential intercourse on political matters,’ and on whom, to use his own words, ‘he could confidently rely when real difficulties were to be encountered.’ Lyndhurst was now in his sixty-ninth year, but he was strong, and proved himself quite equal to the heavy work of his office. ”

“ To do Lyndhurst justice, however, he seemed to bear her no malice, and when the storm, raised by The Times, gathered strength from her friendship for Melbourne and broke in fury upon her before she had been Queen many weeks, Lyndhurst sincerely lamented it. The Tories could not control their disappointment and anger when it was announced that Lord Melbourne was to continue Prime Minister, and they vilified the Queen at every opportunity. ”

“ It showed no decline in the strong reason and masculine eloquence with which he had long fascinated the peers; but, though he frequently attended the house afterwards, he was no more heard in debate. The remaining years of his life were happy, if life can be made happy by ‘love, honour, troops of friends,’ and by carrying into the enforced quiet of extreme age the keen appreciation of all that is best in literature and art and human nature, and a living hope of a better life to come. All these Lord Lyndhurst had in an eminent degree. ”

“ He stands steadily, however vehement and impassioned in what he is delivering, never suffering himself to “overstep the modesty of nature,” to be betrayed into ungainly gesticulations.’ On the fall of Lord Melbourne's administration in November 1834, Lyndhurst again became chancellor during the short administration of Sir Robert Peel, which terminated in the following April. Being free from constant work as a judge, he now took a more active part in the discussions of the House of Lords. ”

“ The people of Lyndhurst ought, I always think, to be the happiest and most contented in England, for they possess a wider park and nobler trees than even Royalty. You cannot leave the place in any direction without going through the Forest. To the east lie the great woods of Denny and Ashurst; and to the north rise Cutwalk and Emery Down, looking across the vale to Minestead, and below them Kitt’s Hill, and the woods stretching away towards Alum Green. On the extreme west Mark Ash, and Gibb’s Hill, and Boldrewood, rise towering one after the other ”

“ The aggressive policy and vexatious tactics of Lyndhurst were distasteful to his nominal leader, the Duke of Wellington, and still more so to Peel, the only possible conservative premier, who eschewed the very name of tory. There was greater unity of counsels between Melbourne and Russell, but Russell, who had learned moderation, was dependent on the support of his extreme left, composed of violent radicals and Irish repealers. ”

“ In doing so, he has made the same change as Pitt and Chatham, as Burke and Mackintosh, as Windham and Brougham, as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey. There are men of a different stamp—men whom no experience can teach, and no facts wean from error—who retain in advanced life the prejudices and passions of their youth, and signalise declining years by increased personal ambition and augmented party spleen. Whatever Lord Lyndhurst may be, he is not one of them. ”

“ Atlay has used information either not open to Lord Campbell or used by him invidiously; and as to Lord Lyndhurst especially he corrects Campbell’s unfair sketch following Sir Theodore Martin’s biography.” (Sat. R.)
“To measure two men so dissimilar in character, opinion and temperament as Lyndhurst and Brougham, with an equal hand is no small 10achievement, and Mr. Atlay deserves all the commendation that we can give him.” ”

“ Lyndhurst may well be called the capital of this romantic forest.
It is quite a charming little town, chiefly built on the slope of a hill, with many beautiful villas and houses surrounding it.
It is well removed from the din and roar of the railway, and from shouts of station porters. It is a quiet place. No, I must qualify that statement; it would be quiet except for those everlasting bells. They clang-clang-clang every quarter of an hour all day long and all night, and all the year round. Poe speaks about:—
“The people, ah! ”

“ What Lord Campbell says of Lord Lyndhurst is, that he was once a Liberal and he has now become a Conservative: that the time was when he would have supported such a bill as that which the Canadian parliament tendered to Lord Elgin, and that now he opposes it. There is no doubt of [Pg 132] the fact: experience has taught him the errors of his early ways; he has not stood all day gazing at the east because the sun rose there in the morning—he has looked around him, and seen the consequences of those delusive visions in which, in common with most men of an ardent temperament, he early indulged. ”

“ It is not much encouragement to ordinary men to know that a man like Lyndhurst retained the power to review the politics of the session with undiminished brilliance till after the age of eighty, for no man could have become what Lord Lyndhurst became, without possessing an exceptional amount of physical vigor from the first. ”

“ He rises before the household is astir, and lets himself out into the mild air.
Hailing a hansom, he tells the man to drive him as quickly as possible to Richmond Terrace. Perhaps Erminie is right, and Eleanor has written to Lyndhurst after all. ”

“ The House of Lords on these great occasions presents a very interesting and impressive appearance. The Chancellor sits robed in his usual place, surrounded by the judges, who are seated on the woolsacks in the centre of the house, all in their full official costume, each rising to read his written judgment. If ever man made a magnificent personal appearance among his fellows, it is Lord Lyndhurst thus surrounded. At the bar of the house stood, or sat, the majority of the counsel engaged on each side, as well as others ”

“ It seems, however, that he found no opportunity of distinguishing himself in the King's service, for about 1763 he 'found leisure to marry' and to settle at Lyndhurst, in the New Forest, where he devoted himself to farming and the usual pursuits of a country gentleman. ”

“ The following is an extract from the Sydney Gazette.
The brief history of Parliament is this. After the resignation of Earl Grey, the King consulted Lord Lyndhurst (of course through the influence of Lady Lyndhurst with the Queen) , about the formation of a Ministry. With the advice of Lord Lyndhurst, tho Duke of Wellington was directed to form a new administration. The condition was "to carry an extensive Reform in Parliament" His Grace, we conclude, found it impossible to form a Cabinet out of his party, who would pledge themselves to carry such a Reform. ”

“ On this occasion Copley so distinguished himself as to attract the attention of Castlereagh and other Tory leaders, under whose patronage he entered parliament as member for Yarmouth in the Isle of Wight. He afterwards sat for Ashburton, 1818–1826, and for Cambridge university 1826–1827. He was solicitor-general in 1819, attorney-general in 1824, master of the rolls in 1826 and lord chancellor in 1827, with the title of Lord Lyndhurst. Before being taken up by the Tories, Copley was a man of the most advanced views, a republican and Jacobin ”

“ There is the grand solitude of Heddon's Mouth and the raven-haunted cliffs to Lynton; there is Lynton itself, drowned in the green woods that surge up the steep hillside; there is the West Lyn Gorge, shadeless and sultry even on a spring day, and the East Lyn Valley, where ferns and lilies of the valley grow, and every green thing that loves moisture and shade; and the Watersmeet, where there is a perpetual rushing of waters which drowns the song of the birds; there is Porlock, between the moors and the marshes, and the drowned forest of Porlock Bay ”

“ If Lynton is beautiful now, with its new houses and hotels, and that air of snugness that prosperity gives to places and persons, the poetic appeal of its loveliness to Wordsworth and Coleridge can be well imagined when only the low-browed, thatched little cottages clung to the steep cliff-paths and clustered round the small harbour, and from the surrounding heights and hills one looked down upon nothing but green valleys, and from the valleys one looked up to the bare cliffs and crags. ”

“ THE CHEESEWRING, VALLEY OF ROCKS. as meditated—Lynton and Lynmouth were in all essentials the same as they are now.
To the lover of nature and the simplicity of country life this conversion of scenery into shekels, and Exmoor into Bayswater, represents by no means pure gain, albeit the lover of humanity may decide otherwise—on the principle of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Both sorts, however, may unite in casting curious glances at the old Lynton which courted neither aristocratic nor democratic favour, and actually had a revel. ”

“ Stand upon one of the terraces of Lynton on a still summer evening, looking east to Countisbury Foreland, and see the water of the bay still and gleaming in the evening light, the great headlands ruddy and golden above it. The steep sides of the gorge of the East Lyn are warm and sunlit, they glow richly with purple and russet; over the rocks of the valley a faint flicker of grey mist begins to hang above the stream. From the trees around and below comes a great cawing of rooks, drowning the rush of the water below ”

“ Lynmouth was a noted resort for herrings all through the Middle Ages, and curing-houses stood on the beach for many years until 1607, when nearly all were swept away by a great storm, and never after properly reconstructed. The herrings also at some time in the seventeenth century left these coasts completely—tradition says because of the avarice of a parson of Lynton, a hard man and greedy, who cared rather to fleece his flock than feed them, and who imposed such heavy tithes on his poor parishioners, that, in spite of the prosperity of their fishing, they were unable to pay them. ”

“ And yet, with it all, there is a holy calm at Lynmouth. Save for the murmur of the Lyn, the breaking of the waves upon the pebbly shore, or the occasional bell of the crier, nothing disturbs the quiet. As there are no advertisement-hoardings, so also there are no town or other bands, minstrels, piano-organs, or public entertainers. Rows of automatic penny-in-the-slot machines are conspicuously not here. There is not a railway station. ”

“ Past the hotels you go, and a little straggle of small modern houses, past the untidy little patch which would be the suburb of a larger community, with upturned boats and washing drying in the sun, and within five minutes a turn of the road hides Lynmouth and the sea from your backward look, and you stand in the heart of a valley and beyond signs of habitation. The southern slope is beautifully wooded, showing every range and variety of green, from the light vivid green of larches to the dull brownish tone of the oaks. ”