who through life was a munificent patron of art and literature. In politics a liberal conservative and follower of the late Sir Robert Peel, he was a free-trader long before that statesman accepted free trade. Lord Ellesmere died on the 18th of February, 1857; and in the following year his contributions to the Quarterly were collected and republished.—F. E.
ELLESMERE, Thomas Egerton, Lord, was the natural son of Sir Richard Egerton of Doddlestone Hall, Cheshire, by the beautiful Mary Sparks, and was born at Doddlestone in 1540. He was carefully reared and well educated by his father, and entered Brazenose college, Oxford, in his sixteenth year. He remained there three years, took his bachelor's degree, and then removed to Lincoln's inn. He devoted himself earnestly to his legal studies, and showed an early aptitude for his vocation. A favourite story, of which various versions have been given by different writers of romance, and which figures in Roger's Italy as "the bag of gold," is said not only to have really occurred in London, but to owe its point to the astuteness of Thomas Egerton. Three cattle-dealers deposited with an old woman in Smithfield a sum of money, on her undertaking not to give it up until claimed by all three. She was cajoled by one of them to give it to him; whereupon the other two sued her at Westminster. The court was about to give judgment against her, when Egerton suggested, as amicus curiæ, that there could be no breach of contract on her part, until she refused the money on the demand of all three, whereas as yet only two appeared. This timely interposition saved the poor woman from ruin; and the embryo-barrister earned his first laurels before he had obtained his wig and gown. After his call to the bar he displayed such skill in a cause against the crown that Queen Elizabeth, to avoid his being again employed against her, conferred on him a silk gown, and gave him precedence over other barristers. He maintained his high character as a lawyer, and in 1581 he was appointed solicitor-general. On the 2nd June, 1592, he was made attorney-general; the celebrated Sir Edward Coke becoming his colleague as solicitor-general. He was knighted the following year, and, on the 10th April, 1594, was made master of the rolls, having been previously appointed to the high and honourable office of chamberlain of the county palatine of Chester. On the 30th April, 1596, the queen made him lord-keeper of the privy seal, in conjunction with which office he still retained that of master of the rolls; and he proved himself to be a most consummate judge. He was an enemy to absurd prolixity, and on one occasion condemned Richard Mylward, a long-winded pleader, to the degrading penance of walking round Westminister Hall, and into the courts then sitting, with his bare head thrust through a hole in a ridiculously amplified replication which he had prepared, the long folds of parchment trailing on each side of him. In August, 1598, he was deputed to negotiate a treaty with the Dutch, which he did to the great advantage of the queen and the coffers of the state. In 1601 he performed a like duty with Denmark, by which he secured an ally, and materially strengthened the protestant interest in Europe. He did himself great credit by his disinterested conduct in behalf of the royal favourite, the earl of Essex, when smarting under the indignity of a box on the ear bestowed by his royal mistress with the queenly admonition—"Begone and be hanged." The lord-keeper not only induced the fiery young nobleman to submit on this occasion, but, on several subsequent outbreaks, acted with unequalled candour and kindness towards the rebellious subject. In 1602 the queen honoured her lord-keeper with a visit at his house in Harefield, near Uxbridge, where he entertained the royal visitor with befitting hospitality. There is, however, nothing on record which redounds more to the honour of this distinguished lawyer than his successful efforts to mitigate the severity of the penal code. The reign of Henry VIII. had been disgraced by no less than seventy-two thousand executions, and notwithstanding the great improvement in manners, and the precautions adopted for the prevention of crime during Elizabeth's reign, the number of persons brought to the scaffold was appalling. The law, with few exceptional cases, had been allowed to take its course; but the lord-keeper, with other commissioners, were now authorized to reprieve in cases of felony, and to substitute where they thought fit service in the queen's galleys for periods commensurate with the offences. He was also tolerant in spirit towards the Roman catholics; and though he introduced measures apparently hostile, his object was to bring them under a less severe tribunal. He improved the court of chancery and corrected many abuses. James, on his accession to the throne, declared that Elizabeth's seal should be still used, and remain in the hands of the same lord-keeper; but, on the 19th July, 1603, the old great seal was broken up, and a new one substituted and delivered to Egerton as lord-chancellor of England, who was at the same time created a peer, with the title of Baron Ellesmere. He then resigned the office of master of the rolls; but unfortunately the king appointed his favourite, Edward Bruce, Lord Kinlosse, who was incompetent to the office, the duties of which the lord-chancellor therefore continued to perform; the royal favourite merely attending to the account of the fees and emoluments of his sinecure office. Lord Ellesmere was instrumental in averting the execution, and procuring the pardon of the conspirators, Lords Cobham and Grey de Wilton. Suspicion, however, attaches to his conduct with reference to the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, and the clemency which was extended to the earl and countess of Somerset, upon whom he passed sentence, but took upon himself the merit of procuring a pardon, which the king was desirous of giving lest, as it was suspected, severity should provoke disclosures which James was anxious to conceal. In 1616 Lord Ellesmere tendered his resignation, which the king, however, refused, and shortly afterwards made him Viscount Brackley; but in March of the following year being then bedridden, the king paid him a visit at York House, and accepted his resignation, with many thanks for his services. Four days afterwards, 7th March, the great seal was given to Sir Francis Bacon; and Lord Ellesmere died on the 15th at the age of seventy-seven, and was buried at Doddlestone. He was unquestionably a great man. He did much to improve the course of legal business and remove abuses, although it must be confessed that he was too unscrupulous a defender of perversions of the royal prerogative, in which he had a formidable opponent in the person of the eminent Sir Edward Coke, whose animosity pursued the Lord-chancellor Ellesmere to the last.—F. J. H.
* ELLET, Mrs. Elizabeth Fries, an American authoress, born at Sodus Point on Lake Ontario, New York, in 1818. Her father. Dr. W. N. Lummis, was a physician, highly respected, both for his professional abilities and for his enterprise and liberality as a citizen. She was educated at a private seminary in the state of New York, and at an early age was married to Dr. W. H. Ellet, professor of chemistry. In 1835 she published a volume of verses, which she wrote with great facility and elegance almost from childhood. About the same time a tragedy, "Teresa Contarini," appeared from her pen, and the young authoress had the pleasure of seeing it represented on the stage. Her subsequent labours have made her name familiar in this country as well as in America. We note as the most important—"The Women of the American Revolution;" "The Domestic History of the Revolution;" "The Pioneer Women of the West;" "Evenings at Woodlawn."—J. S., G.
* ELLICOT, Charles J., B.D., is a distinguished exegetical divine of the Church of England, till lately a fellow of St. John's, Cambridge, and now professor of divinity in King's college, London, was born at Whitwell rectory, near Stamford, in 1819. His first publication was a "Dissertation on the History and Obligation of the Sabbath," which obtained the Hulsean prize in 1843. In 1855 he contributed a paper on the apocryphal gospels to the Cambridge Essays; and in 1858 he published "The Destiny of the Creature, and other Sermons, preached before the University of Cambridge." But his principal work is a series of commentaries on the epistles of St. Paul, of which have appeared, the Epistle to Galatians, 1854; second edition, 1859; Ephesians, 1855; second edition, 1859; Pastoral Epistles, 1856; Philippians, Colossians, and Hebrews, 1857; first and second Thessalonians, 1858. These works may be considered as marking the rise of a new school of scripture exegesis in England, the result of a determination to turn to account the later labours of the German divines in the same field, and the great improvements which have recently been effected in Germany in the grammar and the lexicography of New Testament Greek. Mr. Ellicot frankly acknowledges his many obligations to the writings of De Wette, Meyer, Winer, and other German expositors and grammarians, while freely maintaining the independence of his own exegetic judgment, and presenting many excellent results of his own original studies in the same field. In the first two volumes of the series his commentary was almost exclusively of a grammatical and critical character, but in the later volumes he has intermingled much more of the dogmatic
