e gained
little by the move. Forced in his naked helplessness to resign, he was
succeeded by the Duke of Devonshire, who took care to appoint Pitt
Secretary of State, and to give him the lead in the House of Commons.

Upon the 8th day of November, 1756, Murray was sworn in before Lord
Chancellor Hardwicke, and created a peer by the title of Baron Mansfield,
of Mansfield, in the county of Nottingham, and three days afterward he
sat for the first time in the Court of King's Bench. "Over that great
court," says Lord Brougham, "he presided for thirty years, and his
administration of its functions during that long period shed a luster
alike upon the tribunal and the judge." During that period, too, but two
cases occurred in which his opinion was not unanimously adopted by his
brethren; and of the many thousand judgments which he pronounced but two
were reversed. In all his time no bill of exceptions was ever tendered to
his direction, and "all suitors sanguine in their belief of being
entitled to succeed" were eager to bring their causes to be tried before
him. There were drawbacks to Murray's complete success in the House of
Commons; there were qualities which he lacked whilst practicing at the
bar. Mansfield wanted nothing to make up the perfect portrait of a
British judge. In the Legislature he was helpless in attack; and both in
the House of Commons and in the House of Lords he exhibited on more than
one occasion a want of moral courage as humiliating to his friends as it
proved profitable to his foes; at the bar, learned and able though he
always was, yet wary circumspection even there cramped his powers and
deprived him of the transcendent reputation which other advocates have
earned. On the bench there was neither fear nor hesitation, neither undue
caution nor lack of energy, to impede his great intelligence. There he
sat, as above the common passions of humanity, surveying its doings with
a mind unobscured by prejudice, as wide in its grasp as it was masculine
it capability. His clearness of apprehension, his perspicuity of
statement, his perfect self-command, his vast knowledge of every kind,
were amongst the least of his qualifications for his high station. More
preeminently than all was his heroic and almost chivalric devotion to the
judicial office; his stern and unflinching love of justice, as
distinguished from "the puny technicalities of an obscure walk;" his
superiority to the favors of the great or to the cla