Nevertheless, ere long he was again engaged in orchard-breaking with two of his companions. This time the matter assumed a more serious aspect; they were taken before a magistrate, who, for the offence, fined each of their fathers thirty shillings — a penalty which sat lightly on the future chancellor; though he seems to have been quite alive to the inconvenience of a sharp scourging, which his father inflicted, preparatory to handing him over to the more experienced Moises, who, as instructed, com-pleted the ceremony in due and wonted form.

One day John Scott met with an accident which threatened to prove fatal. Tumbling from a window-seat in the schoolroom against a bench, he was so severely cut in the head that his intellect, and even his life, were for some time thought in danger. The indentation caused by the wound remained, it is said, to the end of his long and prosperous life. On another occasion, being extremely curious to see what was within a window, beneath the stone steps of a house, he incautiously thrust his head between the iron rails, and was unable to draw it out, till assisted by a female beggar, who, happening to pass along the street, extricated him from this untoward dilemma.

In the midst of all his gay pranks and mischievous enterprises he had made no small progress in his daily studies; and when in his fifteenth year, was not only a good classical scholar, but well skilled in the somewhat rarer accomplishment of English com-position. Religious exercises were, fortunately for him, strictly attended to in the well-regulated semi nary of Moises, who was in the habit of marching to church on Sundays, with all due pomp, circumstance, and formality, at the head of his boys; and Scott, on being examined by his father on the sermon he had beard, was always able in the evening to prove the attention with which he had listened by entering into the minutiae of the discourse, and even repeating the very phrase used by the preacher: thus also giving early proof of those powers of memory that afterwards reared his mighty learning.

His juvenile accomplishments certainly were various, for when, on Christmas-day, the elder Scott gave a supper and dance to the bargemen whom he employed, the future Lord Eldon was in the habit of dancing a hornpipe to the enlivening strains of some veteran Northumbrian's fiddle for the amusement of the burring guests. Indeed, he appears to have taken great delight in the dancing-school, and used afterwards to dwell on the scenes enacted there with much complacency. The female pupils, it seems, were in the habit of bringing their dancing - shoes with them, and it was considered a proper, and no doubt a pleasant, piece of etiquette to assist the prettier of the young nymphs in putting them on.

Then, early on the Sunday mornings, the joyous and enamoured youths used to pilfer flowers from the gardens in the neighbourhood of the Forth, to present to their fair sweethearts. "Oh!" exclaimed Lord Eldon, as he glowed with the pleasures of retrospection, after having held the Great Seal for a quarter of a century, "those were happy days — we were always in love then!" He could even remember what kind of stockings the young ladies wore. Indeed, in boyhood, and especially in love affairs, the future sage of the law showed no signs of being troubled with the doubts and hesitations that in later years haunted and perplexed him in the Court of Chancery. On the contrary, he appears to have acted, in good time and at all hazards, on the advice of the poet:—

"Quid sit futurum eras, fuge qurerere; et Quem sors dierum cunque daliit, lucro Appone; nee dulces amores Sperne, puer, neque tu choreas;

Donee virenti canities abest Morosa."

It is related that a Miss Allgood was the first object of his attachment; but she, according to his own account, was scornful. He was, however, sufficiently susceptible of tender impressions to find consolation in the attractive charms of less contemptuous damsels.

Meanwhile, his eldest brother William, afterwards eminently distinguished as Lord Stowell, had, in his sixteenth year, obtained a scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and pursued his first triumph so successfully, that in 1706, when the father wrote to notify his intention of making the future keeper of royal consciences a coal-fitter, he requested that the latter might be sent up to him. Accordingly, in the beginning of May, our hero, a handsome boy no doubt, was packed off in the London coach, and, after being three nights and four days on the road, was received at the White Horse, in Fetter Lane, by his brother, who took him to see the play at Drury Lane, which seems to have interested him much. In the same month he was matriculated as a member of the University of Oxford by the Vice-Chan-cellor, having that day been entered as a Commoner of University College. He had not then completed his fifteenth year, and looked still so much more juvenile than he really was, that the elder brother was, to use his own expression, quite ashamed of his boyish appearance

During the long vacation his father judiciously put him once more under the charge of Mr. Moises, which seems to have been felt as a sad wound to his lately acquired dignity. This was not all salved by his preceptor expecting great things from him, on account of his having been a short while at

Oxford, nor by the name of the "Oxonian," which seems to have been applied rather in derision than honour, and adopted by the whole of his Newcastle acquaintances.

In the following year he was elected to a fellowship, and in 1770 took his bachelor's degree. The examination, he used to say, was a farce in his time, and he gave the following account of it:—

"I was examined in Hebrew and in History. 'What is the Hebrew for the place of a skull?' I replied, 'Golgotha.' 'Who founded University College?' I stated (though, by the way, the point is sometimes doubted) 'that King Alfred founded it.' 'Very well, sir,' said the examiner; 'you are competent for your degree.'"

In 1771 he carried off the Chancellor's prize for the best composition in English prose; the subject of his essay being "The Advantages and Disadvantages of Foreign Travel." His modesty on the occasion was so excessive, that he had actually to be taken by the shoulders and pushed into the Shelden Theatre, by the future Bishop of Clonfert, when the latter had recited his prize poem. This academic achievement was the cause of great joy to his old instructor, who, entering the school, with the essay aloft in his hand, said, in a tone of triumph, to the senior boys, "See what John Scott has done!" His favourite pupil, perhaps finding ambition no cure for love, was shortly, much to his old instructor's grief, to bear away a prize more charming still, and for which the competitors were not innumerous.

In his twenty-second year he became so seriously and deeply attached to Miss Surtees, then known as the "Newcastle Beauty," that, hourly apprehensive of seeing her forced into a union with an opulent rival, he, much to the surprise and conster nation of the whole town, ran off with her to Scotland, where they were married, and, as every one concluded, ruined for life. The heroine was just entering her nineteenth year, and looked very much younger from her style of dress, and the ringlets that flowed around her fair shoulders. She was extremely beautiful and attractive, both in form and face; and her appearance is reported to have been, on the whole, so captivating as, in the opinion of even staid persons and severe critics of female grace, to have furnished the hero with at least one apology for the hasty and, at first sight, imprudent step which terminated the romance of his life. Both families, who probably would not have been more surprised if the Tyne had flowed backward, were, at first, greatly perplexed and chagrined at the occurrence; but the honest heart of the old hoast-man soon so far relented, that he gave the youthful couple an invitation to his house, which, of course, was gladly accepted; and he afterwards obtained the co-operation of the bride's father, who was a wealthy banker, in a scheme for their maintenance. The bridegroom, however, was of course obliged to relinquish his fellowship at Oxford; but there remained a year of grace, during which he had the option of accepting any college-living that might come to his turn. With a view of having two strings to his bow, he began the study of the law; but the church, as he said, was his first mistress, and it was not till all hope of a college-living had vanished, that he betook himself earnestly to the studies appertaining to that profession, with which his name is now so indestructibly linked. Thus the marriage, which seemed likely to involve him in irretrievable ruin, proved, in the end, the means of his achieving great success and enduring fame.

Excited only by the prospect of far-distant success, and cheered and sustained in his arduous toil by the presence of her for whom he had sacrificed learned leisure, he laboured with unremitting and wonderful devotion to his new pursuits. In December, 1775, he removed from Oxford to London, and in the following February was called to the bar. At first he was not so successful as he had anticipated - he even contemplated settling in his native town; but his unrivalled industry speedily overcame all obstacles. In 1788 he became Solicitor-General, and was, somewhat against his will, honoured with knighthood. In 1793 he was promoted to be At-torney-General. In 1799 he was appointed Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas, and created a peer by the title of Baron Eldon, of Eldon. In 1801 he became Lord Chancellor, and held the Great Seal, with a short interval, till 1827; having been advanced to the rank of earl in 1821. He died on the 13th of January, 1838, in the eighty-seventh year of his age, after having long and conscientiously devoted himself to the public service, and filled a large and important space in the public eye.

The sense of duty which prompted his labours, and the extraordinary industry which he exhibited in pursuing them, were such as to entitle his memory to the utmost respect; while the high rank and distraction to which they were the means of elevating him, the confidence which was reposed in him by his sovereign and his country, and the veneration which is now rendered to his name by political friends and foes, are, in an eminent degree, calculated to animate the aspiring youth to emulate the integrity he mani fested, and to imitate the labour he underwent in his struggles for fame and fortune.