ploy Sir C. Robinson, and afterwards Dr. Dodson, to read his judgments for him. One of his judgments was given in the celebrated case of the slave Grace, 26 Sept. 1827 (Moore, Memoirs, vi. 156). At length, on 22 Feb. 1828, old age compelled him to resign. Sir Walter Scott writes, 24 May 1828: ‘Met my old and much-esteemed friend, Lord Stowell, looking very frail and even comatose. Quantum mutatus! He was one of the pleasantest men I ever knew’ (Lockhart, Life of Scott, vii. 135). For the rest of his life he lived principally at Earley Court, Berkshire, which he occupied in right of his first wife. Lord and Lady Sidmouth, his son-in-law and daughter, resided there with him during great part of the year, and Lord Eldon was a constant visitor. Down to April 1833 he was in communication with Lord Eldon about public affairs, but after that his mind gave way. He was never made aware of the death of his son in November 1835, and though his will, which he made himself on 30 April 1830, made no provision for the event of his surviving his son, his daughter felt it to be useless to endeavour to bring him to make arrangements adapted to the altered circumstances. He died at Earley Court in the afternoon of 28 Jan. 1836, and was buried at Sonning, near Reading. His personalty was sworn under 230,000l., and he left besides landed estates producing 12,000l. per annum.
Scott married, on 7 April 1781, Anna Maria, eldest daughter of John Bagnall of Earley Court, Berkshire, by whom he had four children; only two grew up: William, who was M.P. for Gatton from 1826 to 1830, and died of intemperance on 26 Nov. 1835 (Gent. Mag. 1836, i. 99); and Mary Anne, who married first, in 1809, Colonel Thomas Townsend of Honington, Warwickshire, and secondly, in 1823, the first Viscount Sidmouth. His first wife died on 4 Sept. 1809, during his absence on a visit to the Duke of Atholl in Scotland. He became acquainted with his second wife, Louisa Catherine, a daughter of Admiral Earl Howe, widow of John, first marquis of Sligo, whom he married 10 April 1813, through having to pass sentence on 16 Dec. 1812, as presiding judge of the admiralty sessions at the Old Bailey, upon her son, the second marquis, for enticing two seamen to desert from a man-of-war at Malta and join the crew of his yacht. The story that Lady Sligo made the first advances for a marriage in the ‘New Monthly Magazine’ for January 1846 is ill-founded, but the acquaintance of Sir William Scott and Lady Sligo certainly arose from this trial. The match was discountenanced by Lord Eldon, and was ill-assorted from the first. Scott was parsimonious and convivial, Lady Sligo domestic and open-handed. They lived unhappily, first at her house in Grafton Street, which was settled on Scott for life, and to which he removed from 5 College Square, Doctors' Commons, where he had lived over thirty years, and afterwards in Cleveland Row, but they soon informally separated, and on 26 Aug. 1817 she died, having borne him no children.
In person Scott was below the middle height, fair-haired, corpulent in his later years, of a benign expression of face, and, though slovenly in dress, very courteous and polished in manner. There is a portrait of him, painted in 1812 for the Newcastle guildhall, and engraved in Twiss's ‘Life of Eldon,’ vol. ii. His constitution was feeble in his early years; he was always a great eater and drinker, a ‘two-bottle man’ (Boswell's Johnson, ed. 1835, viii. 67), and a bon vivant. His brother said of him ‘he will drink any given quantity of port.’ Despite his excesses his bodily health remained good till he was nearly ninety. All his life he was a saving man; the phrase ‘the elegant simplicity of the three per cents’ is his, and many stories were told of his niggardliness. Yet all his life, as ‘Dr. Scott of the Commons’ and as a judge, he was welcome in the best society of his time; he was a wit and a scholar, and, as a speaker, master of a cold, polished eloquence.
As a judge he stands in the front rank with Hale and Mansfield, and his services to maritime and international law are unsurpassed. His decisions are reported in the reports of Christopher Robinson (1798–1808), Edwards (1808–12), Dodson (1815–1822), and Haggard (1789–1821). Before Scott's time no reports of the decisions of the admiralty court had been published. He was thus little fettered by the judgments of his predecessors, and was free to be guided by the writers on Roman, canon, and international law, and by the historical material with which his own reading had made him familiar. At the same time the circumstances of the French wars poured into his court for decision the fullest and most varied series of cases in maritime law that has ever occurred. He thus enjoyed the greatest opportunity of giving unity and consistency to a whole department of English law, and for a generation he was rather a lawgiver than a judge in the ordinary sense of the term. Upon many maritime points his judgments are still the only law; and, little popular as they were at the moment among the Americans, who often suffered by them,
