Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1867 edition. Excerpt: ... Sketch IV. LORD TRURO. "Tis pleasant through the loopholes of retreat To peep at such a world; to see the stir Of the great Babel, and not feel the crowd., Cowper. If the Poet experienced such pleasure from the contemplation of the active busy world, and congratulated himself upon his absence from it, it must give still greater pleasure to look upon and contemplate an active and useful life brought to a successful close, apart and abstracted from all the heat and turmoil of actual professional strife, the competition of rivals, and the anxieties and plausible misgivings of admiring and approving friends. Such pleasure the writer experiences in reviewing the circumstances of the life of this most industrious lawyer and eminent Counsel, and from the personal reminiscences of his intercourse with a great mind, although that intercourse was limited in its extent. Within the whole range of the large circle of lawyers who have obtained celebrity and wealth by unceasing professional exertions, there is not one the contemplation of whose career can convey such complete satisfaction to a young and ambitious youth as that which I have here attempted feebly to sketch. If the maxim of Demosthenes for success in elocution was u Action, action, action," the watchword for emulation as a practical lawyer may well be "Industry, industry, industry." To that almost exclusively may be attributed the successful progress of Thomas Wilde--Lord Truro. Of humble extraction, but of a family in its sphere universally respected, when once his good fortune had placed him in the proper groove, the rapid pace at which he arrived at eminence at the Bar, on the Judgment-seat, and in the Senate, was truly astonishing, even in the present age of wonderful development and...
