. The conception of this work is
magnificent; its execution wretched. Intended to evolve a history of
jurisprudence from the truthful portraits of England's greatest lawyers,
it merely exhibits the ill-digested results of desultory learning,
without a trace of scientific symmetry or literary taste, without a
spark of that divine imaginative sympathy which alone can give flesh and
spirit to the dead bones of the past, and without which the present
becomes an unintelligible maze of mean and selfish ideas. A charming
style, a vivid fancy, exhaustive research, were not to be expected from
a hard-worked barrister; but he must certainly be held responsible for
the frequent plagiarisms, the still more frequent inaccuracies of
detail, the colossal vanity which obtrudes on almost every page, the
hasty insinuations against the memory of the great departed who were to
him as giants, and the petty sneers which he condescends to print
against his own contemporaries, with whom he was living from day to day
on terms of apparently sincere friendship.

These faults are painfully apparent in the lives of Hardwicke, Eldon,
Lyndhurst and Brougham, and they have been pointed out by the
biographers of Eldon and by Lord St Leonards.[6] And yet the book is an
invaluable repertory of facts, and must endure until it is superseded by
something better. It was followed by the _Lives of the Chief Justices of
England, from the Norman Conquest till the death of Lord Mansfield_,
8vo, 2 vols., a book of similar construction but inferior merit.

It must not be supposed that during this period the literary lawyer was
silent in the House of Lords. He spoke frequently. The 3rd volume of the
_Protests of the Lords_, edited by Thorold Rogers (1875), contains no
less than ten protests by Campbell, entered in the years 1842-1845. He
protests against Peel's Income Tax Bill of 1842; against the Aberdeen
Act 1843, as conferring undue power on church courts; against the
perpetuation of diocesan courts for probate and administration; against
Lord Stanley's absurd bill providing compensation for the destruction of
fences to dispossessed Irish tenants; and against the Parliamentary
Proceedings Bill, which proposed that all bills, except money bills,
having reached a certain stage or having passed one House, should be
continued to next session. The last he opposed because the proper remedy
lay in resolutions and orders of the House. He protests in favour of
Lord Monte