Majorcans, on the subject, and, amongst others, with the works of Raymond Lull. Though Dr. Chalmers says his works are not worth reading, Raymond Lull was a remarkable man and a benefactor to mankind. One cannot but admire the self-denial with which he gave up his position and property, no mean ones, after his confession; his untiring energy and unflagging zeal in the furtherance of his cause, and when people and princes failed him, and he sank Tecum volo vulnerari, Tu cruce desidero. L. HAILSTONE, JUNR. YOUTH AND AGE. YEARS make not age; the head may gleam in white, Be present to thy thought, the clouds though black, Shall glide, and radiance and thy life be one! Her smile would pall! the couch soon sickens piled with flowers! LIVES OF THE LORD CHANCELLORS OF IRELAND. (105.) A.D. 1767.-LORD LIFFORD, (James Hewitt.) The Hewitts were a family of humble position in the north of England, until the middle of the last century. Their first introduction into mercantile society was through William Hewitt, a silk mercer and draper' in the county of Cumberland, who, in 1744, attained the summit of his ambition in becoming Mayor of the city of Coventry. His eldest son, James, the subject of this memoir, was born in 1709, and gave, from his earliest years, assurances of those abilities which were destined, Later on, to win for him a coronet and the woolsack. His father, seeing his partiality for "the law," bound him, as an apprentice, to an attorney, at whose desk he laboured for several years. The drudgery of this branch of the profession was, however, not suited to his tastes. Having acquired much practical information in the attorney's office, he was enabled the more readily to comprehend the mysteries of the law; to become a barrister was to enter, perhaps, on the path to promotion; and having enrolled his name accordingly as a law student on the books of the Middle Temple, he was called to the bar in 1742, being then, thirty-three years of age. His first act was to join his circuit, upon which he soon took a leading place. Nothing beyond the ordinary circuit business occurred until 1752 erro and 53, when the country was disturbed by many riotous assemblages, caused by the passing of an act altering the Kalendar as it was then received by the English people. To the vulgar the alteration appeared to be a dark and deadly sin; no less, in fact, than the relapsing of the whole country into the errors of the Church of Rome. To the anxious inquirer into the records of past ages, nothing can be more perplexing than an neous system of chronology. It was. plain that the legal years in the old style, as century succeeded century,. were falling away from the true astronomical year; for the "Julian Kalendar," in fixing the year at 365 days. six hours, had given to it eleven minutes and eleven seconds more than the true astronomical year, which consists of 365 days, five hours, fortyeight-minutes, and forty-nine seconds. This error was so manifest in the sixteenth century, that the Council of Trent recommended a reformation of the Kalendar, which Pope Gregory XIII. accordingly caused to be carried into effect. Had he not done so, the 1st of January would, in the course of ages, by reason. of the annual errors of eleven. minutes, fall on the longest day in the year. The pontiff entrusted. the complicated and perplexing work of correcting those errors to the great Jesuit astronomer, Clavius.3 By the statute of the 24 Geo. II.,, 1 NOTE, that although in the period of Lord Lifford's chancellorship, which extended from 1767 to 1789, were comprised the most startling events of Irish history, yet as the great discussions which took place thereon were confined to the House of Commons, of which Lord Clare was then a member, the consideration of these subjects is postponed to his life, which we expect, in our August number, in great part to give. Vide Playfair's Family Antiquities; Lodge's Peerage 3 Histoire de la Compagnie de Jesus, par Creteneau Joly, vol. ii. pp. 320, 321. For the fullest information on this most interesting of subjects, vide Alban Butler's Lives vol. x. p. 364, note to St. Teresa's day. Also Wheatley on the Book of Common Prayer, chap. i. chap. 23, it was enacted that the year, which before that time, in England and Ireland, had commenced on the 21st March, was thenceforward to be computed to begin on the 1st January, and the error of eleven days was swept away. The change caused great rioting in England, and, as we may well believe, those who denounced the alteration did not confine their scientific and theological arguments to idle words. The bar profited by the excitement, indictments were multiplied, and the old adage may have been brought to the minds of "the strollers" on circuit, that "it is a bad wind that blows nobody good." Hewitt was now (1754) ambitious of parliamentary honours; but having been unsuccessful in a contest for the city of Coventry, he confined himself for some years to the practice of his profession. He was appointed sergeant in 1755, and once again stood for Coventry, in 1761, and was returned. A follower of Mr. Pitt, Hewitt was opposed to the ministry, whose policy deprived England of her North-American colonies. It was in March, 1764, that Mr. Grenville, then First Lord of the Treasury, submitted to the House of Commons various resolutions respecting new duties to be levied on foreign goods imported into the colonies. These were followed by another and fatal resolution for raising a "direct" revenue from the colonies, by imposing a stamp duty, with the offer, however, of substituting any other equally productive tax which the colony might prefer. This intimation was resented as a menace, and the measures proposed by the minister were resisted by the Ameri leader, Mr. Pitt, "that America has resisted: three millions of people so dead to all feelings of liberty as voluntarily to submit to be slaves would have been fit to make slaves of all the rest." 2 Meanwhile, a question was now brought under public discussion, involving one of the most important points relative to the liberty of the subject which had been agitated since the Revolution, namely, the legality of general warrants. Mr. Wilkes, M.P. for Aylesbury, had attacked in a series of papers, called the "North Briton," all the measures of the Government. The language was full of coarse invective and scurrilous ribaldry. A general warrant was issued on the 26th April, 1763, by Lord Halifax, one of the principal Secretaries of State, commanding the apprehension of the authors, printers, and publishers, of these seditious papers; and the house of Mr. Wilkes was, in consequence, entered in the night by three king's messengers, who seized his papers and his person. On the 13th February, 1764, a motion was brought before the House of Commons, to the effect that the general warrant, just described, was illegal. Mr. Pitt denounced it as such, while the administration opposed the consideration of the question, on the grounds that the House was about deciding a point of law just then at argument in the courts of justice. A division was taken, and the motion rejected by a majority of 232 against 218, Mr. Pitt and Serjeant Hewitt voting in the minority.3 The next question in which the Serjeant, who, it appears, was a miserable debater, took part was concerning the practice of the Attorney general filing informations ex officio, instead of proceeding by the 1 Jones's History of England, vol. i. chap. ii. p. 35, 37, 38. State Trials; Jones's History of England, vol. i. p. 33. 3 Parliamentary Debates (England) from 1764, p. 175. ordinary process of indictment. The motion, which was lost, had been moved in the house by Mr. Calvert, and seconded by Serjeant Hewitt, who stated the abuse and the danger of filing informations ex officio, but (the reporter sarcastically adds) in so cold a manner that the motion may be said to have received no material support from his speech." In 1766, Mr. Pitt, who had been created Earl of Chatham, took office in the coalition ministry as Lord Privy Seal. In the same year, Hewitt, a vacancy occurring, was appointed one of the Puisne Judges of the King's Bench, and some months after, through the powerful interest of the Earl, was created Chancellor of Ireland (on the death of Lord Bowers), and he was also raised to the peerage by the title of Baron Lifford, to which the dignity of Viscount was added in 1781. The Prime Minister (the Duke of Grafton), in speaking of this appointment, says, that Lord Lifford accepts the seal with very good disposition to discharge properly the great trust put into his hands. His learning as a lawyer sanctioned our expectations. He was a true Whig, and bore a character to which all parties gave their assent of respect, and though his speeches in parliament were long, and without eloquence, they were replete with excellent matter and learning in the law."2 66 The new Chancellor was about to enter on the duties of office at a time when the Catholics of Ireland were making great struggles to lighten the load with which they had been weighed down for centuries. A Catholic committee having been formed, one of their body, Lord Taaffe, accompanied by the Rev. John Carpenter, D. D., a Roman Catholic priest (afterwards Archbishop of Dublin), waited on Lord 1 Parliamentary Debates. Lifford, for the purpose of enlisting, before he should have crossed over to Ireland, his sympathies in their behalf. He had long been hostile to the oppressive policy adopted by England towards her North American colonies, and it was believed that he was equally opposed to the penal code. On the 19th of December 1767, Dr. Carpenter, then in London, wrote to the Catholic Committee in Dublin as follows:3 "I have the express command from his lordship (Lord Taaffe), to communicate the steps he has taken since the 12th. The next day he waited on your new Chancellor, Lord Lifford, with whom he conversed for a considerable time on the affairs of Ireland. He (Lord Taaffe) assured him with his usual plainness and sincerity, that he had quitted his family and friends, and undertaken, at this advanced time of his life, a long and toilsome journey, with no other view than to obtain some relief for his poor distressed countrymen. He spoke very freely, as well as feelingly, to the Chancellor of the rigour of the penal laws, and of the refusal given to the Elegit bill, and dwelt a good deal upon some facts to which he happens to be a witness in the south, the fatal effects of those troubles, and the violent party rage which had been the cause of them. He concluded with an earnest request that he (the Chancellor), would use every possible means of informing himself of the true state of the country (Ireland). "The substance of what the Chancellor said during the long conversation was, that he was fully determined to open his ears to any information necessary for the impartial adminstration of justice; that the refusal of granting any other security to Catholics for money lent 2 Journal of the Duke of Grafton. 3 O'Conner's MSS., continuation of the History of the Irish Catholics; Dal on's Archbishops of Dublin, p. 474-476. but a personal and precarious one, was both unreasonable and cruel; and that a mitigation of the rigour of some penal laws already seemed to be intended, from the late determination of the Chancellor here, in the case of Hobson v. Marsh. "Lord Taaffe was extremely well pleased with his visit, and went directly to court. Here the Queen took particular notice of him; she congratulated him on his recovery from the gout, told him the King had spoken to her of him, and continued for some time conversing to him in German. "At this time he again met with Lord Lifford, by whom he was accosted in a very friendly manner. From the acquaintance with the Chancellor, which he will endeavour to improve, my lord has great expectations. He is now abroad every day from morning until night, and is determined to omit no opportunity of engaging the interest of the great while he remains here. Besides the visits he makes, he regularly attends at the levées of the court, and at the assemblies of the several ambassadors, so that I shall hereafter enjoy but very little of his company. This account of his progress here, he still positively asserts, must not be communicated by you to any except the three persons he mentioned in a former letter." The Chancellor left, soon after this interview with Lord Taaffe, for Dublin, and yet so dismal was the feeling of prejudice, at the time, against the Catholics, that nothing was done in their favour until 1771, when an act was passed (11 and 12 George III. chap. xxi. secs. 1-5) enabling a Catholic to take a long lease of fifty acres of bog, "and one half an acre of arable land as a site for a house, or for the purpose of delving for gravel, or limestone, for manure, next adjoining to such bog, and to hold the same at such rent as shall be agreed upon be- In the same year the Chancellor was appointed, by 11 and 12 George III. chap. xiii., a commissioner for the improvement of the new street "called, in the whole or in part, Sackville-street (in the city of Dublin), and sometimes called, in the whole or in part, The Mall." In 1773, he presided in the House 1 Haverty's History of Ireland, 704. |