Another weakness of the biographer is an eloquent effort to _prove_ that a barrister, whose talents raise him to the summit of his profession, is but little the worse for the want of a university education. It would have been quite sufficient to say, that Philip Yorke rose to be the first lawyer of his age, and Lord Chancellor, without having ever set foot within the walls of a college. Yorke, at the commencement of his career, was fortunate in an introduction through Parker, one of his fellow-students at Salkeld’s, to Lord Macclesfield, Lord Chief Justice, to whose son it is said that he was engaged as law-tutor. The Chief Justice received him at his table, took an evident interest in his progress, and patronised him on every important occasion. Yorke’s manners were as gentle as his intellect was acute; and such a man would naturally be received with favour at the table of a person so high in rank as Lord Macclesfield. But it has never been said that he humiliated himself for that honour; and through life he had a quiet way of gaining his point, of which a curious instance was given in his earliest days. The wife of Salkeld was a thrifty personage, who, evidently thinking that her husband’s pupils might be employed in other operations than scribbling parchments, occasionally sent him on her messages, and even to execute some of her commissions in Covent Garden Market. Yorke obeyed, but on giving in the account of his expenditure on those occasions, there appeared frequent entries of coach hire, for “celery and turnips from Covent Garden,” a “barrel of oysters from the fishmonger’s,” &c. &c. Salkeld, perceiving this, remarked to his wife on the expensive nature of this “saving,” and Yorke was no longer employed as her conveyancer of celery and turnips. He had also some pleasantry as well as point, of which an anecdote was told by the late Jeremy Bentham. Powis, one of the judges of the King’s Bench, one day at a lawyers’ dinner expressed to Yorke his “surprise” at his having got into so much business in so short a period. “I conceive,” said the old fool, “that you must have published some book, or be about publishing something; for look, d’ye see? (which seems to have been a favourite phrase of his,) there is scarcely a cause before the court but you are employed in it.” Yorke answered with a smile, “that he had indeed some thoughts of publishing, but that he had yet made no progress in his book. Powis, priding himself on his sagacity, begged to know its nature. He was answered that it was a “Versification of Coke upon Littleton.” The judge begged a specimen, on which Yorke recited— “He that holdeth his lands in fee Need neither to quake nor to shiver, I humbly conceive; for _look, do you see_, They are his and his heirs for ever.”