s been of a different opinion
it shall never bias me."

From the days when Alexander Wedderburn, in his new silk gown, to the
scandal of all sticklers for professional etiquette, made a daring but
futile attempt to seize the lead of the circuit which seventeen years
later he rode as judge, 'The Northern' had maintained the _prestige_ of
being the most important of the English circuits. Its palmiest and most
famous days belong to the times of Norton and Wallace, Jack Lee and John
Scott, Edward Law and Robert Graham; but still amongst the wise white
heads of the upper house may be seen at times the mobile features of an
aged peer who, as Mr. Henry Brougham, surpassed in eloquence and
intellectual brilliance the brightest and most celebrated of his
precursors on the great northern round. But of all the great men whose
names illustrate the annals of the circuit, Lord Eldon is the person
most frequently remembered in connexion with the jovial ways of
circuiteers in the old time. In his later years the port-loving earl
delighted to recall the times when as Attorney General of the Circuit
Grand Court he used to prosecute offenders 'against the peace of our
Lord the Junior,' devise practical jokes for the diversion of the bar,
and over bowls of punch at York, Lancaster, or Kirkby Lonsdale, argue
perplexing questions about the morals of advocacy. Just as John
Campbell, thirty years later, used to recount with glee how in the mock
courts of the Oxford Circuit he used to officiate as crier, "holding a
fire-shovel in his hand as the emblem of his office;" so did old Lord
Eldon warm with mirth over recollections of his circuit revelries and
escapades. Many of his stories were apocryphal, some of them
unquestionably spurious; but the least truthful of them contained an
element of pleasant reality. Of course Jemmy Boswell, a decent lawyer,
though better biographer, was neither duped by the sham brief, nor
induced to apply in court for the writ of 'quare adhaesit pavimento;'
but it is quite credible that on the morning after his removal in a
condition of vinous prostration from the Lancaster flagstones, his
jocose friends concocted the brief, sent it to him with a bad guinea,
and proclaimed the success of their device. When the chimney-sweeper's
boy met his death by falling from a high gallery to the floor of the
court-house at the York Assizes, whilst Sir Thomas Davenport was
speaking, it was John Scott who--arguing that the orator's