The Life and Correspondence of Philip Yorke Earl of Hardwicke, Vol. 1 PDF Download

Author: Philip C. Yorke
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781331232742
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 714

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Book Description
Excerpt from The Life and Correspondence of Philip Yorke Earl of Hardwicke, Vol. 1: Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain He was engaged in a great and ambitious undertaking, no less than the series of the lives of the Lord Chancellors, for 1000 years, from the earliest times to his own; and in this we should expect to find the life of Lord Hardwicke, perhaps the greatest of them all, together with his period, the golden age of equity, treated as the crowning glory of the work. It is well known how greatly the anticipations and hopes formed of Lord Campbell's biographies were disappointed. There is probably no book of modern times of equal pretensions that contains so many and such gross errors, and so many base and baseless innuendoes. But of the whole bad series, the life of Lord Hardwicke appears to be the worst. Here are to be found not only the common mistakes of ignorance or negligence, not only the common errors of judgment, but a deliberate picking and choosing amongst falsehoods to which it is astonishing that the author could have condescended. Throughout no one could suppose the narrative to be that of a distinguished judge, trained to weigh evidence and to administer justice and equity, zealous for the honour of his profession and offering to the public the portrait of his greatest predecessor. The consequences have been deplorable. Lord Campbell's work continues to be widely read; new editions continue to be published, and a number of later writers, misled perhaps by Lord Campbell's great name, continue to copy from his untruthful pages and carry further the false traditions there established. For example, the writer of the most recent account of Lord Hardwicke, that in the last edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, has been content to found his article on the same worthless "high" authority, although in the same publication, in the article on Lord Campbell himself, he is warned of the character of Lord Campbell's writings, and in particular that the Life of Lord Hardwicke is amongst his worst productions. Meanwhile George Harris, a barrister of the Middle Temple of some standing, had been preparing a Life of Lord Hardwicke from the family papers at Wimpole, which was published in 3 volumes in 1847, immediately after Lord Campbell's work. The author, however, appears to have been very ill-fitted for the task. He complains too of "not seeing any of the Wimpole papers until so late, then being only allowed a glance of them at Wimpole, instead of having them all before me, and only during the last half-year being allowed to take them away, and then merely a portion at a time." About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works."