Lord Hardwicke had now full opportunity for the display of all his talents; and their combination in one man was certainly an extraordinary evidence of the powers of discipline and nature. He was at once a first-rate lawyer, a first-rate statesman, and a first-rate public speaker. Any one of those high attainments might bring sufficient to make the business of a life—in him they were the easy attributes of a master-mind. His oratory was not of the school which afterwards gave such eminence to Chatham. It had none of the brilliant impetuosity of that Demosthenes of English orators; but it had a captivation—the captivation of eloquence and grace—which gave interest even to the driest details of the tribunal. Lord Camden, himself a powerful public speaker, thus described Hardwicke on the bench:— “In the Court of Chancery, multitudes would flock to hear the Lord Chancellor, as _to hear Garrick_. His clearness, arrangement, and comprehension of his subject, were masterly. But his _address_ in the turn which he gave to all, whether he was in the right, or was ‘to make the worse appear the better reason,’ was like _magic_.” His high employments now brought opulence with them; and he purchased from Lord Oxford the fine estate of Wimpole, in Cambridgeshire, which had come into the Oxford family by marriage with the Duke of Newcastle’s heiress. In 1740, Philip Yorke, the Chancellor’s eldest son, married the daughter of Lord Breadalbane, and grand-daughter of the Duke of Kent. Horace Walpole, in his correspondence with Conway, thus smartly sums up the good fortune of this most prosperous family: “Harry, what luck the Chancellor has! first, indeed, to be in himself so great a man. But then, in accidents. He is made Chief Justice and Peer, when Talbot is made Chancellor and Peer. Talbot dies in a twelvemonth, and leaves him the Seals, at an age when others are scarcely made solicitors. Then he marries his son into one of the first families of Britain, obtains a patent for a marquisate, and eight thousand pounds a-year, after the Duke of Kent’s death. The Duke _dies in a fortnight_, and leaves them all! People talk of fortune’s wheel that is always rolling; troth, my Lord Hardwicke has overtaken her wheel, and rolled along with it.” The present attempt to give legislative power to the Jews, an attempt whose success would inevitably change the _Christian character_ of the legislature, gives a revived interest to the following decision of the great Chancellor. A legacy of £12,000 having been left by a Jew, “for establishing an assembly for reading and improving the Jewish law,” and the case having been brought into court, the Chancellor decided against the application of the legacy. The note of this judgment, recorded in his own note-book, is as follows:—