nt until the mulct was paid, the unfortunate statesman
bitterly repented the imprudence which had exposed him to the vengeance
of political adversaries and to the enmity of the vulgar. Whilst the
passions roused by the prosecution were at their height, the fallen
Chancellor was treated with much harshness by Parliament, and with
actual brutality by the mob. Ever ready to vilify lawyers, the rabble
seized on so favorable an occasion for giving expression to one of their
strongest prejudices. Amongst the crowds who followed the Earl to the
Tower with curses, voices were heard to exclaim that "Staffordshire had
produced the three greatest scoundrels of England--Jack Sheppard,
Jonathan Wilde, and Tom Parker." Jonathan Wilde was executed in
1725--the year of Lord Macclesfield's impeachment; and Jack Sheppard
died on the gallows at Tyburn, November 16, 1724.

Throughout the inquiry, and after the adverse verdict, George I.
persisted in showing favor to the disgraced Chancellor; and when the
violent emotions of the crisis had passed away it was generally admitted
by enlightened critics of public events that Lord Macclesfield had been
unfairly treated. The scape-goat of popular wrath, he suffered less for
his own faults, than for the evil results of a bad system; and at the
present time--when the silence of more than a hundred and thirty years
rests upon his tomb--Englishmen, with one voice, acknowledge the
valuable qualities that raised him to eminence, and regret the
proceedings which consigned him in his old age to humiliation and gloom.

[15] It should be observed that many persons are of opinion that the
Lord Keeper's assertion on this point was not an artifice, but a simple
statement of fact. To those who take this view, his lordship's position
seems alike ridiculous and respectable--respectable because he actually
intended to forbear from taking the barrister's money; ridiculous
because, through clumsy and inadequate arrangements, he missed the other
and not less precious gifts which he did not mean to decline. Anyhow,
the critics admit that credit is due to him for persisting in a
change--wrought in the first instance partly by honorable design and
partly by accident.

[16] The cases of John Scott, Philip Yorke, and Edward Sugden are before
the mind of the present writer, when he pens the sentence to which this
note refers. The social extraction of the English bar will be considered
in a later chapter of this work.