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Published by R.Phillips N71 S.Pauls Church Yard. London.

PUBLIC CHARACTERS,

OF 1802-3.

THE

LORD AUCKLAND.

HE times in which we live have been peculiarly marked by party divisions, feuds, and animosities; attended by more virulence and rancour, more personality and abuse, than good men would have wished to have witnessed, especially when great characters were engaged in a struggle for popularity and power: and the public pulse has been so much irritated and inflamed by these contests, that the fever of party cannot be presumed to have sufficiently subsided, to make it fit for a casual biographer to discuss them; let him be ever so impartial he would necessarily be liable to be charged as a writer influenced by some prejudice personal or political. If, therefore, in the following memoir of a nobleman, who certainly has not been an inactive spectator of the great events of his own times, we have refrained from entering at large into his political conduct and character, it is because we deem it, at once, more prudent and more becoming to leave such topics to the candid pen of the future historian, and to the cooler judgment of posterity.

William Lord Auckland, LL.D. and F. R. S. is

1802-3.

B

the

the third son of the late Sir Robert Eden of West Auckland, to one of whose ancestors the rank of baronetage was given by King Charles the Second in 1672. The eldest son, Sir John Eden, Bart. was representative for the county of Durham in two parliaments, and is still living. The second, Sir Robert Eden, heretofore Governor of Maryland, was created a baronet in 1776, and was succeeded by the present Sir Frederick Morton Eden. The fourth son is a merchant of London; and the fifth is the present Lord Henley of the kingdom of Ireland. The connection of the Edens with the very ancient houses of Widdrington, Fairfax, Sheffield, Vere, Kene, and Chichele, is fully deduced in Collins's Baronetage, and in the Stemmate Chichlean.

Lord Auckland was educated at Eton. In 1763 he became a student of Christchurch, Oxford, by the nomination of the present Bishop of Durham, In 1765 he was admitted to the Society of the Middle Temple in 1768 he took the degree of Master of Arts; and in the same year was called to the bar, and went the Northern circuit. In December 1770. he appears to have been one of the counsel for Sir Thomas Rumbold, on the Shrewsbury election, at the first select committee that was chosen under Mr. Grenville's excellent bill for the trial of controverted elections. In 1771 he was appointed Auditor and, one of the Directors of the Royal Hospital at Greenwich; and about the same time he published the first edition of the Principles of Penal Law. In 1772 he quitted the bar for the office of Under Secretary of

State

State, and retained that employment six years. In 1774 he was chosen representative for Woodstock, and continued a member of the House of Commons till 1793, proving himself during the whole of that period one of the most active, able, and useful representatives of the people, that ever held a seat in that most respectable and constitutional assembly. In September 1776 he married Miss Eleanor Elliot, daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliot, Treasurer of the Navy, and sister of the present Lord Minto. In the same year, and still retaining the office of Under Secretary of State, he was appointed one of the Lords Commissioners of Trade and Plantations, and was of that board till 1782, when its duties and power were, under the act of parliament commonly termed " Mr. Burke's Bill for the Reform of the Civil List," transferred to a committee of the Privy Council, at which the Earl of Liverpool has so long and so ably presided.

Early in his parliamentary career Mr. Eden began to take a distinguished part: in 1776 he brought forward the bill for incorporating the Commissioners and Governors of Greenwich Hospital, which passed the regular stages in both houses, received the royal assent, and became an act of parliament. In the same session Mr. Eden proposed a bill (the act 16 Geo. 3. cap. 43.) to authorize for a limited time the punishment by hard labour of offenders who for certain crimes might be liable to be transported to any of his Majesty's colonies in America. Some provision of the kind had been rendered necessary by the

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