Lord Campbell has learned to take a broad and manly view of the Profession which his own erudition adorns. In his temporary retirement he paid homage to literature; and literature, as is her wont, rewards her worshiper by extending his vision and emancipating his mind. A more intimate acquaintance with the transactions and passions of the past, a disinterested and unbiased survey of the lives and triumphs of his illustrious predecessors, has prepared our present Chief Justice for his eminence by teaching him, above all things, that judicial fame does not arise from a dull though perfect knowledge of the technicalities of law, and that there is all the difference in the world between a splendid ambition and the groveling prosecution of an ignoble trade. It is certainly not extraordinary that the life of the great Earl of Mansfield has been contemplated by his biographer until a sense of humility has been engendered, and eloquent admiration for transcendent intelligence evoked. From among a host this luminary stands forth. Faultless he was not, as we shall presently see; but his failings, whatever they may have been, in no way obscured the luster of a genius that gave sublimity to the most prosaic of pursuits, and, in the teeth of prejudice, vindicated law against the toils of the narrow-minded and the opprobrium of ages. What Bacon proved to philosophy Mansfield in his day became, in a measure, to his own cherished science; and, as Coke affected commiseration for the author of the _Novum Organum_, so the fettered slaves of forms and rules in later times pitied and reproached Lord Mansfield for his declared unconquerable preference for the spirit of justice to the unilluminated letter of the law. Nature and education prepared William Murray for the very highest forensic distinction, and his career is chiefly remarkable for the certain, though gradual steps, by which he reached it. His success was the legitimate and logical result of the means sedulously taken to obtain it. Had William Murray failed to win his race, it would have been because he had dropped down dead on the course, or violent hands had forbidden his progress. The conditions of victory were secured at starting, in his own person, let the competitors be whom they might. The spirit of the boy was as ambitious of worldly glory as the spirit of the man looked for undying fame; from first to last, from the beginning of the century until the close of it, the same application, the same aptitude, the same self-devotion, and the same clear, unruffled, penetrating judgment, were visible in Mansfield's useful and protracted life.