often heard the cry of wildfowl, but was soon to be covered with the dwellings of Guildford Street and Brunswick Square, and the dismal and seldom traversed regions of Mesopotamia, that lie beyond Mecklenburgh Square and worthy Captain Coram's Home for Foundlings. Long after Great Ormand Street had ceased to be a quarter of highest fashion, it was well esteemed as a thoroughfare in which great noblemen were still to be found, and as the center of that law quarter-now-a-days called the “old law quarter"-from which Chief Baron Pollock retired but a few years since, and in which a few members of the bar still reside for the sake of old associations and low rents.

Lord Thurlow lived in Great Ormond Street at a time. when judges and sergeants, king's counsel (a "select few" in the last century), and wearers of stuff, constituted the majority of his neighbors in Bedford Row and Queen Square, and the residential streets lying between those points.

Whilst "The Great Bear" of the lawyers replenished his cellar and entertained his friends with good port in Great Ormond Street, at the date already mentioned, a thief leaped over the garden wall, forced two bars from the frame of the kitchen window and crept upstairs to the room in which the Chancellor was wont to keep the Seal. The Clavis Regni was found in its accustomed place, and the thief carried it off, snugly enveloped as it was in two bags, and also laid hands upon two silverhilted swords, and a trifling sum of money. The robber * effected his escape without arousing the Chancellor or any member of the family. Lord Campbell, it should be observed, and the writers from whom he has taken this story, concur in representing the theft as the act of more than one thief, but as all attempts to discover the offender or offenders were in vain, it is unknown whether

but one or more than one burglar entered the house. The footprints in the garden seemed to indicate that at least two persons had been concerned in forcing the bars of the window; but it is most probable that only one man entered the dwelling.

As soon as the sun had risen the theft was discovered, and before the "law quarter" had breakfasted it was known to every member of the legal profession resident in London that the Great Seal was no longer in Lord Thurlow's hands. The news ran like wildfire, and by midday the tatlers of the Temple and the quidnuncs of the coffee-houses were repeating a hundred different versions of the story. By some it was gravely asserted that the theft was achieved by the Whigs under the impresIsion that the sudden withdrawal of the seal would so embarrass the ministry that they would be compelled to resign. That this eminently ridiculous suspicion was entertained by political partisans is proved by one of the contributors of the "Rolliad," who writes:

"The rugged Thurlow, who, with sullen scowl,
In surly mood, at friend and foe will growl,
Of proud prerogative the stern support,
Defends the entrance of great George's court
'Gainst factious Whigs, lest they who stole the seal
The sacred diadem itself should steal :

So have I seen near village butcher's stall

(If things so great may be compared with small),
A mastiff guarding on a market-day

With snarling vigilance his master's tray."

By others it was affirmed that the seal was required for the fabrication of a spurious charter or patent, the consequences of which might not transpire beneath the observation of the present generation. The more probable explanation of the bold felony is that the burglar perpetrated his crime under the erroneous but not unnatural impression that the possession of that particular seal was a matter of the highest importance to the Chancellor and all persons concerned in the government of

the country, and that the ministry would consent to pay a vast sum of money, and guarantee impunity to the thief who should restore the bauble.

If this was the thief's expectation he was greatly disappointed. As soon as the Chancellor arose, he called on Mr. Pitt in Downing Street, and the two statesmen forthwith hastened to Buckingham House, where they informed the king that a burglar had made off with his Great Seal, but fortunately had not taken the Royal Conscience with it. A Council was forthwith called, and on that same day-March 24, 1784—an order was given for the immediate manufacture of another seal for the Chancellor's use.

By noon of the following day the chief engraver laid before the Council a seal, hastily designed and imperfectly finished, which was forthwith put in use, and remained the Clavis Regni until April 15, 1785, when it gave place to a new seal of proper excellence and workmanship.

The history of this third Great Seal was remarkable beyond the annals of all other Great. Seals, both in respect of the men who held it, and the purposes to which it was applied. It was the seal which Wedderburn, the useful defender of Samuel Johnson and the hired calumniator of Benjamin Franklin, seized as the reward of unscrupulous services and as compensation in full for the loss of every honest man's respect.

It was the same Great Seal which had been felicitously called Erkine's Extinguisher. For less than fourteen months Thomas Erskine held it; and for that brief period of official triumph, the eloquent advocate and sincere champion of popular interest sacrificed wealth, position, applause, - everything but personal honor. On losing office he was a peer, a wit, a man of fashion; but he had lost the princely income which he had for

years won in the exercise of his profession, and he could never again hope to be the idol of the populace, and the public actor to whom the educated leaders, not less than the rabble of his party, looked for protection and rendered enthusiastic homage. When imprudent speculations and foolish extravagance had driven him to pawn his modest pension, and caused him to anticipate the chill penury of his closing years, he remembered with regret the sacrifice he had made to ambition, and reflected feelingly on the cruel fortune which deprived him of office before he could provide for the future. In men of less fine nature such reminiscences occasion splenetic outbursts and sarcastic ill-humor; but Erskine smiled at his own disaster, and enjoyed the better luck of less deserving competitors. At a dinner-party Captain Parry was asked what was the principal food of himself and his crew when they were frozen up in the Polar seas. "We lived chiefly upon seals," was the captain's answer. "And very good living, too," interposed Erskine, "if you keep them long enough.'

One of the strangest accidents that befell George III.'s third Great Seal occurred at Encombe, in the autumn of 1812. Eldon was then Lord Chancellor, and was residing at his country seat, when part of the house was destroyed by a fire that broke out at night. With admirable expedition the fire-engine was at work, and Lady Eldon's maid-servants were helping to supply it with water. "It was," wrote Lord Eldon, "really a very pretty sight; for all the maids turned out of their beds, and they formed a line from the water to the fire-engine, handing the buckets; they looked very pretty, all in their shifts." But ere the Chancellor found time to survey the maid-servants with approval, he had provided for the safety of the Great Seal, which he was accustomed to keep in his bedchamber. The mishap of his

old friend. Thurlow had been a lesson to the cautious Eldon; and rather than have run any risk of losing the Great Seal by robbery he would have imitated Heneage Finch, and slept with it under his pillow. At the first alarm of fire the Chancellor hastened out of doors with the Great Seal, and burying it in a flower-bed confided it to the care of mother earth. That prudent act accomplished, he ran to the aid of his maid-servants.

But when morning came, and the sun looked down on a mansion damaged, not destroyed, by fire, it occurred to Eldon that it was time for him to recover the seal from its undignified concealment. With that intention, he bustled off to the long terrace where he had buried his treasure; but on arriving there, to his lively chagrin. and alarm, he found that he had omitted to mark the exact spot of its interment. Whether the grave had been dug in this bed or in that-whether on the right or the left of the gravel walk-whether above or below the fish-tank-he could not say. In his perplexity he sought counsel of Lady Eldon, and by her advice the same maid-servants who had figured so picturesquely by firelight, together with the entire staff of gardeners, were provided with spades, shovels, trowels, pokers, tongs, curling-irons, old umbrellas, and other suitable implements, and were ordered to probe old mother earth in the region of the long terrace, until she delivered up the "pestiferous metal" which had been committed to her in trust. "You never saw anything so ridiculous," observed his lordship, “as seeing the whole family down that walk probing and digging till we found it." A burden of anxious care must have fallen from the Chancellor's mind when the cry of "Found, my lord!" reached his ears.

It was the fortune of this Great Seal, on two separate occasions, to be abused by the Chancellor holding it in