date

18 Oct r 1807 Lords Delegates
18 Oct r 1807

Lords Delegates

Letter VII

Letter VII Eldon's Plan

At the outset of my first address to Your Lordship, [...?] in the very nature of the case a certificate of Your Lordship's being provided /under the necessity of providing yourself/ with a learned advisor, I numbered among the advantages of obscurity, that of not knowing /my compleat and wilful ignorance/ concerning the person to whose share that honour had fallen: the same obscurity secures to me the same advantage in the present instance.

That the learning of the noble Lord who is at the very head of learning whose learning forms the very summit of the pyramid, may to a first glance wear the face of a solecism /inconsistency/ should need or admitt of any such co-adjutor howsoever learned as one to whom any such title as that of Advisor can with propriety be applied, is a notion which at /to a/ first glance may be apt to wear the face of solecism: but by a very short reflection on matters of fact unhappily but too notorious, any seeming incongruity will I flatter myself be removed.

What Your Lordship, I am confident, as well as every other reader whose misfortune it is to have any the slightest acquaintance with Westminster Hall understands me already to have in view is the extreme pressure of that portion of the business which /that/ flows in upon that side and and[?] of it which is occupied by the Court (of Chancery) which has but one seat in it and that filled now for the second time by Lord Eldon. The pronouncing of decrees /decision/ when so it has happened, that in virtue of a gift become of late years somewhat rare /which in our days has not fallen to the share of every Chancellor/, a Chancellor feels within himself /finds himself endowed with/ the faculty of making one /coming to a decision/, is among those obligations, which if it were possible for obligations of the perfect class to reach so high, would in that station be acknowledged to be perfect and indispensable. The framing of Bills is an operation which of late years seems to have been regarded as superfluous,
Similar Items
  • Title: [19 Oct r 1807 Lords Delegates]
    Description: 19 Oct r 1807

    Lords Delegates

    Letter VII

    Letter VII Eldon's Bill

    Letter VII

    My Lord

    Before me lies a Bill, Order for printing dated 10 August 1807, and /if/ the papers of the time are to be believed laid upon the Table of the House of Lords by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon.

    This Bill will form the /It is this Bill that forms the principal/ subject of the present Letter.

    Taking this Bill for its subject at least for its principal subject it is to his Lordship /Lord Eldon/ that on some account it would most naturally be addressed.

    Your Lordship's however was the first seal stamped upon the measure. To Your Lordship as first occupant, will belong an incontestable share in whatsoever fruit in the shape of acknowledged merit and respect may ultimately be reaped from it.

    With Your Lordship I have contracted that sort of ideal familiarity which results from the habit of correspondence, even where if so it may be said without a solecism the correspondence happens to be, like the sort of reciprocity we sometimes hear of, all on our side. Into the presence, though it is but the ideal presence of the noble and Learned lord I should feel an awkwardness in attempting to intrude (myself).
  • Title: [Oct r 1807 Lords Delegates]
    Description: Oct r 1807

    Lords Delegates

    Lett. VII Eldon's Plan

    in every station unless it be that of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and in particular in every station filled by any learned occupant, has at all times so far from constituting the matter of perfect obligation been numbered /referred to/ in the class of works of super-rogation[?]: and it would be especially in these ticklish and religious times, I would not, offer any such /it would be especially in these ticklish and religious times/, injury /affront/ to the orthodoxy of either Chancellor, as to ascribe /impute/ to him any leaning towards /propensity towards any such or any other/ popish [...?].

    Under these circumstances, even to /in the case of/ a man to whom it happens it may have happened, if to any man it did happen to be his lordship's learned hand laying the Bill in question on the Table of the Lords House, to view in any such operation conclusive evidence that the Bill had his Lordship for its author that before or even after the penning it his Lordship's mind[?] had ever been actually applied to it, would be no less rash than if from the reading of a record in which the pleadings /altercations/ between Mr. Doe and Mr. are stated as having been carried on before the King himself at Westminster, a man were to hold it for truth that the royal mind had been actually unfortunate and misdirected /ill-advised/ enough to apply itself to any such squabbles.

    Being on the present occasion as on the former /abovementioned/ one seated by Obscurity in the lap of Ease, I proceed without reserve in the examination of the three consolidated Bills.
  • Title: [19 Oct r 1807 Lords Delegates]
    Description: 19 Oct r 1807

    Lords Delegates

    Letter VII

    Letter VII Eldon's Bill

    Along with the Bill which, under /in/ I know not what hand comes endorsed to me with the words L

    d

    Eldon's, come two others endorsed respectively in the same hand. L d President's Bill and L d President's 2 d Bill, both without any other date endorsed than the year, neither of them having any intimation of an Order for printing (made by) the House.

    Comparing the Lord Chancellor's Bill such henceforward I shall venture to call it with the two Bills of the Lord President, I find to so considerable an extent a coincidence, as shews the Lord Presidents plan to have been taken as a basis by the Lord Chancellor.

    In my last Letter which was honestly written before this /the present one/, written indeed in the main several months before any one of these three Bills came into my hands, I was exulting at the auspicious coincidence in so many essential points between the ideas of the learned Lord at the head of Scottish Law, and those of the adventurous and unlearned as well as untitled individual who has not the honour to be /no such honour as that of being/ at the head or so much as the tail of any thing that ever went by the name of law.

    (Taking up his Lordship's two Bills for the purpose of the present Letter (I have at the outset the mortification to find alas! find at the outset all that exaltation at an end.) at the very first glance all that exultation stops, and the repose of despondency takes its place.

    (Great however as is my concern, my disappointment is not equal to it.)