I did not look at him while this was going on, but
I felt like a coal--for I like Merivale, as well as the article in
question.
Asked to Lady Keith's [5] to-morrow evening--I think I will go; but it
is the first party invitation I have accepted this "season," as the
learned Fletcher called it, when that youngest brat of Lady----'s cut
my eye and cheek open with a misdirected pebble--"Never mind, my Lord,
the scar will be gone before the _season_;" as if one's eye was of no
importance in the mean time.
Lord Erskine called, and gave me his famous pamphlet, with a marginal
note and corrections in his handwriting. Sent it to be bound superbly,
and shall treasure it.
Sent my fine print of Napoleon [6] to be framed. It _is_ framed; and the
Emperor becomes his robes as if he had been hatched in them.
[Footnote 1: Thomas, Lord Erskine (1750-1823), youngest son of the tenth
Earl of Buchan, a midshipman in the Royal Navy (1764-67), an ensign, and
subsequently a lieutenant in the First Foot (1767-75), was called to the
Bar in 1778, and became Lord Chancellor in 1806. As an advocate he was
unrivalled.
"Even the great luminaries of the law," says Wraxall ('Posthumous
Memoirs', vol. i. p. 86), "when arrayed in their ermine, bent under his
ascendancy, and seemed to be half subdued by his intelligence, or awed
by his vehemence, pertinacity, and undaunted character."
With a jury he was particularly successful, though he lived to write the
lines quoted by Lord Campbell ('Lives of the Chancellors', ed.
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