DEATH OF MANSFIELD.

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In his eighty-second year, having been absent scarcely a day from court, Lord Mansfield retired to Tunbridge Wells for the benefit of his health. The year following he resigned his office. For six years longer he lived in dignified retirement, occupying himself in his garden, or refreshing his mind with the works that had charmed and instructed his youth. To the last he retained his memory, and, dying without a pain at the close of the century, the man who had spent his happiest evenings with Pope was destined to listen to all the horrors of the French Revolution, in common with thousands living at the present hour. Lord Mansfield's death was mourned as a national calamity; his remains were deposited in Westminster Abbey, and they lie close to those of the Earl of Chatham. After the stormy conflict of a glorious life the schoolboy rivals lie side by side in silent and everlasting repose.

We have freely stated the one great deformity of Lord Mansfield's character; his quailing before Lord Camden is but a solitary instance of the fault that tarnished his otherwise brilliant career. When we have said that the Chief Justice acted unconstitutionally in continuing in the Cabinet whilst he held the judicial office, and that, admitted to the friendship and confidence of his Sovereign, he did not scruple to exercise power without official responsibility, we have confessed to the most serious offences with which he is chargeable. It is not, however, to dwell upon these blemishes of true greatness, or to indulge in idle panegyric, that we have now taken up the pen, and intermixed with the living doings of to-day one striking record of

the buried past. The life of Lord Mansfield is nothing to us if it yields no profitable instruction and contains no element of usefulness for the generation to whom our labours are addressed. Is it wholly unnecessary to place at this moment before the bar of England so noble a model for imitationso sublime an ideal for serious contemplation as that offered in the person of the Earl of Mansfield? Is it impertinent to warn our lawyers that, without confirmed habits of industry, temperance, self-subjugation, unsullied honour, vast knowledge, enlightened and lofty views of their difficult yet fascinating profession, and a love of the eternal principles of truth and justice, incompatible with meanness and degrading practice, true eminence is impossible, and imperishable renown not to be obtained? Never, at any other period of our history, has it been so necessary to urge upon the students of the law the example of their worthiest predecessors. The tendency of the age is to lower, not to elevate, the standard set up by our ancestors for the attainment of pre-eminence. That our giants may not be stunted in their growth-that the legal stock may not hopelessly degenerate-Chief Justice Campbell does well to impress upon his brethren the patient and laborious course the high and admirable qualities-by which Chief Justice Mansfield secured his greatness and his fame.

August 22, 1850.

THE MODERN NIMROD.

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LION HUNTING IN AFRICA.

JOHN BRIGHT should be in ecstasies! Roualeyn Gordon Cumming, after five years' absence from his native land, returns to help the member for Manchester to abolish the game laws. What will be the use of laws for the preservation of game when the game itself is repudiated? Five Years of a Hunter's Life has already reached a second edition. Two editions more will about exhaust the sporting readers of the United Kingdom; and what sportsman then, what individual with a blush of shame in his fallen nature, will survey a poor partridge with a nobler sentiment than he regards the barndoor fowl? We dare the British lion to spend his magnificent energies in running a timid unresisting hare off his agitated legs the instant he ascertains how the unaided pluck of one man has extinguished the supremacy of his African prototype. As easily imagine that England's admired aristocracy will pass their holidays in catching flys and flaying earwigs as suppose that they will condescend to cowardly battues, having learnt how the uncaged lion himself may be met on equal terms, and vanquished bravely as a king should be. It is time to enlarge the sphere of our recreations. In all that concerns our daily occupations we have been marching of late in sevenleagued boots. With respect to our manly pleasures

we are still in swaddling clothes. In the days of railroads and electric telegraphs, marine and earthly, it is really too derogatory to human dignity to gallop after a harmless puss with the view of giving fire to the blood of the undignified pursuer. We have Never awakened to the fact before, so complacently does wonder sleep upon the neck of custom. Roualeyn the First opens our eyes with his rifle, and it will not be that potentate's fault if we lazily close them again.

It is not, however, without an alarming sense of inability that we presume to deal with the adventures of Roualeyn Gordon Cumming, prince of hunters, conqueror and autocrat of all the beasts. We are conscious of our great audacity in venturing even to quote the achievements of a hero, now, for the first time in his life, weeping because there are no more animals to vanquish, and desolate because the megatherium was disposed of before he took to shooting. What can the feeble quill say of a gentleman who quitted Great Britain that he might take part in a war against savages, and bade adieu to civilisation and the Cape because warring with mere men yielded no relish to his splendid and bloody ambition? With what spirit shall we address ourselves to the labours of a fellow Christian who seriously informs us, that "the sweetest and most natural sounds" he ever heard were the bellowings of a whole troop of hungry lions, to which he listened in the depths of a forest at the dead hour of midnight, "unaccompanied by any attendant, and ensconced within twenty yards of the fountain" which the said lions were awfully approaching that it was a "joyful moment" to him

:

MR. CUMMING'S IDEAS OF ENJOYMENT.

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when, on another occasion, he found himself face to face with a maddened lioness, and he "at once made up his mind that she or he must die "--the chances being twenty to one at the moment in favour of the brute? How can we assimilate our notions of things in general with those of an individual who gravely assures us that "lion hunting may be followed to a certain extent with comparative safety," and that nothing more is required of "him who would shine in the overpoweringly exciting pastime of hunting this justly celebrated king of beasts," than "a tolerable knowledge of the use of the rifle, an acquaintance with the disposition and n.anner of lions (!), perfect calmness and self-possession (!!), and a recklessness of death (!!!)"? To speak the plain truth, Mr. Roualeyn Gordon Cumming's ideas of enjoyment are so very peculiar, and the coolness with which he talks of things unpleasant is so absolutely frightful, that a flesh and blood reviewer is about as much at home with him as the adventurous editor of a weekly newspaper found himself the other day deciding, with bludgeons on either side of him, between the respective merits of the amiable Tipton Slasher and the not less redoubtable Bendigo.

We are not too proud to acknowledge our utter incapacity in the presence of a personage who cannot close his eyes o' nights for the intense amusement he derives from a mad chorus of leopards, elephants, and hyænas, all screaming within a few yards of his dormitory; who mourns for a gun that bursts in his hands as David mourned for Absalom"; who "takes coffee" and then "rides for a leopard"