My father was born on the following twenty-first of June, a posthumous child, and lived with his grandfather and his two sisters. His mother soon married again, her second husband being Mr. Farrer, of Brayfield in Buckinghamshire, who had been an officer in the Blues. I am afraid that my father had not a very happy childhood, for the historian seems to have been rather crabbed in his old age. Besides, he was fully taken up with his studies and his work, and cared not to busy himself with the yearnings of a child. However, his two half-sisters, Frances and Louisa, were devoted to their brother, and the little boy had a good friend in his grandfather’s younger brother, John, who, in the meantime, had come to great distinction. Having been called to the Bar in 1777, he, three years later, published the famous book commonly called “Mitford on Pleadings,” which speedily became a classic. Lord Eldon said that it was “a wonderful effort to collect what is to be deduced from authorities speaking so little what is clear”; while Sir Thomas Plumer declared that it “reduced the whole subject to a system with such universally acknowledged learning, accuracy and discrimination, as to have been ever since received by the whole profession as an authoritative standard and guide.” It was equally well accepted in America, and when I was in the United States in 1873 more than one well-known judge and lawyer came up to me wanting to know what relation I was to the “Pleadings.” The success of the book brought prosperity and a seat in Parliament, by the favour of his cousin, the Duke of Northumberland. In 1793 he succeeded his lifelong friend Sir John Scott (Lord Eldon) as Solicitor-General; the Attorneyship followed as a matter of course, and in 1801 he became Speaker of the House of Commons. This latter office he did not hold long, for in 1802 Lord Clare, who was Lord Chancellor of Ireland, died, and Sir John Mitford was appointed to succeed him, being raised to the peerage as Baron Redesdale of Redesdale in Northumberland, a title which he took from the beautiful moorland property on the southern slope of the Cheviots which he had purchased with the idea of linking himself as closely as might be with the border home of the ancient clan.