Chapter XIII: Francis North (3)

Although he never aimed at oratory, it is said that he meditated a "history of his own times." He might have transmitted to us many curious anecdotes, but the performance must have been without literary merit; for some of his notes which he had written as materials are in the most wretched style, and show that he was unacquainted with the first principles of English composition, and even with the common rules of grammar. He did publish two or three short tracts "on music" and other subjects, which were soon forgotten. He was well versed in music, conversed with Sir Peter Lely about painting, speculated with natural philosophers on the use of the bladder of fishes, and learned several of the continental languages; but he seems never to have looked into a classical writer after he left college, and to have had the same taste for the _belles lettres_ as his brother Roger, who, placing them all in the same category, talks with equal contempt of "departed quacks, _poets_, and almanack makers." Although his two immediate predecessors were libelled and lauded by popular verses in the mouths of every one, I can find no allusion in any fine writer either of the court or country party to North; and it may be doubtful whether he knew anything of the works of Butler, of Dryden, of Waller, or of Cowley, beyond the snatches of them he may have heard repeated in the merry circle at Whitehall.

He lived very hospitably, receiving those who retailed the gossip of the day in his house in Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, then the fashionable quarter of the town for the great nobility as well as for eminent lawyers. The nobility and chief gentry coming to London frequently dined with him. The dinner was at a very early hour, and did not last long. "After a solemn service of tea in a withdrawing room, the company usually left him." He had a court room fitted up on the ground floor, which he then entered, and there he continued hearing causes and exceptions, sometimes to what was considered a late hour. About eight o'clock came supper, which he took with a few private friends, and relished as the most agreeable and refreshing meal of the day.

In the vacations, when he could be spared from London, he retired to his seat at Wroxton. For some years he likewise rented a villa at Hammersmith, but this he gave up soon after his wife's death. He had the misfortune to lose her after they had been married only a few years. She seems to have been a very amiable person. She found out when her husband had any trouble upon his spirits, and she would say, "Come, Sir Francis, (as she always styled him,) you shall not think; we must talk and be merry, and you shall not look on the fire as you do. I know something troubles you; and I will not have it so." He would never marry again, which in his last illness he repented, for "he fancied that in the night human heat was friendly."

He was extremely amiable in all the relations of domestic life. Nothing can be more touching than the account we have of the warm and steady affection subsisting between him and his brother, who survived to be his biographer.

The lord keeper was a little but handsome man, and is said to have had "an ingenuous aspect."

He left behind him Francis, his son and heir, the second Baron Guilford, father of Francis, the third Baron Guilford, on whom descended the barony of North, by failure of the elder branch of the family, and who, in 1752, was created Earl of Guilford, and was the father of Lord North, the prime minister, so celebrated for his polished oratory, his refined wit, and amiable manners.[109]

When we estimate what the lord keeper achieved, we should bear in mind that he died at _forty-eight_, an age considerably more advanced than that reached by his immediate successor; yet under that at which other lord chancellors and lord keepers began to look for promotion. He was in truth solicitor general at _thirty-four_, attorney general at _thirty-seven_, chief justice of the Common Pleas at _thirty-eight_, and lord keeper and a peer at _forty-five_. It is probably well for his memory that his career was not prolonged. He might have made a respectable judge when the constitution was settled; but he was wholly unfit for the times in which he lived.

I ought not to conclude this memoir without acknowledging my obligations to "Roger North's Life of the Lord Keeper;" which, like "Boswell's Life of Johnson," interests us highly, without giving us a very exalted notion of the author. Notwithstanding its extravagant praise of the hero of the tale, its inaccuracies, and its want of method, it is a most valuable piece of biography, and with Roger's lives of his brothers "Dudley and John," and his "Examen," ought to be studied by every one who wishes to understand the history and the manners of the reign of Charles II.