Henry Bickersteth, Lord Langdale, was the luckiest of physicians and lawyers. He used the medical profession as a stepping-stone, and the legal profession as a ladder, and had the fortune to win two of the brightest prizes of life--wealth and a peerage--without the humiliation and toil of serving a political party in the House of Commons. The second son of a provincial surgeon, he was apprenticed to his father, and educated for the paternal calling. On being qualified to kill, he became medical attendant to the late Earl of Oxford, during that nobleman's travels on the Continent. Returning to his native town, Kirby Lonsdale, he for awhile assisted his father in the management of his practice; but resolved on a different career from that of a country doctor, he became a member of Caius College, Cambridge, and devoted himself to mathematical study with such success that, in 1808, when he was twenty-eight years old, he became Senior Wrangler and First Smith's prizeman. As late as the previous year he was consulted medically by his father. In 1811 he was called to the bar by the Inner Temple, and from that time till his elevation to the Mastership of the Rolls he was both the most hard-working and hard-worked of the lawyers in the Equity Courts, to which he confined his practice. In 1827 he became a bencher of his Inn; and, in 1835, although he was a staunch and zealous liberal, and a strenuous advocate of Jeremy Bentham's opinions, he was offered a seat on the judicial bench by Sir Robert Peel. This offer he declined, though he fully appreciated the compliment paid him by the Tory chieftain. He had not, however, to wait long for his promotion. In the following year (1836) he was, by his own friends, made Master of the Rolls, and created a peer of the realm, with the additional honour of being a Privy-Councillor. His Lordship died at Tunbridge Wells, in 1851, in his sixty-eighth year. It would be difficult to point to a more enviable career in legal annals than that of this medical lawyer, who won the most desirable honours of his profession without ever sitting in the House of Commons, or acting as a legal adviser of the Crown--and when he had not been called quite twenty-five years. To give another touch to this picture of a successful life, it may be added, that Lord Langdale, after rising to eminence, married Elizabeth, daughter of the Earl of Oxford, to whom he had formerly been travelling medical attendant.