gents, he was chosen as their chief. He speedily proved his military capacity for the post by taking Pilsen and driving the army of Bucquoi out of Bohemia. He was placed under the ban of the empire. Undismayed by this, he was faithful to the cause he had chosen, and made a gallant struggle in a losing cause on behalf of Frederick the elector palatine. In 1622 he ravaged Alsace and defeated the Bavarian and Hessian forces. Carrying the war into the Low Countries, and followed by a daring band of free companions, whom the prospect of hard blows and free quarters had attracted to his banner, he joined his forces to those of Christian of Brunswick and defeated the Spaniards at Fleurus. Passing into Holland, he was warmly welcomed by the prince of Orange. Tilly himself, whom the emperor sent against him, found him so strongly posted in East Friesland as to render any attack upon him a very doubtful measure. Mansfeld travelled for some time from court to court, a gallant and brilliant adventurer, seeking aid for a cause which then seemed desperate enough. In 1626 his forces were crushed by Wallenstein. He turned southwards, intending to carry on the war in Hungary. It was too late; Bethlem Gabor had just made terms for himself. Mansfeld handed over his command to the prince of Saxe Weimar, and set out on a journey to Venice. At a little village near Zara in Dalmatia, he was taken ill: as his last hour approached he made his attendants dress him in full uniform once more, and then, supported in the arms of two of them, met his fate, erect and upright. This was in November, 1626; he was but forty-one. His enemies called him "the Attila of Christendom," and assuredly he ravaged and burnt a good deal; but he was a gallant gentleman, an able commander, and bravely faithful to a losing cause.—W. J. P.
MANSFELD, Peter Ernest, Count de, was born in 1517. After accompanying the Emperor Charles V. on his African expedition, he served in the Low Countries, and distinguished himself at the siege of Landrecies in 1543. He was appointed governor of the duchy of Luxemburg, but was subsequently taken prisoner by the French, 1552, who detained him in captivity until 1557. He shared in the great Spanish victory of St. Quentin, and successfully defended Thionville against De Guise. He succeeded to the governorship of the Low Countries on the death of Parma in 1592; but was superseded by the Archduke Ernest in 1594. He died at the great age of eighty-seven in 1604.—W. J. P.
MANSFIELD, William Murray, Earl of, chief-justice of England for nearly thirty years, and a contemporary of Thurlow and Loughborough, obtained more eminence than either as a lawyer and a statesman. Descended through a long line from noble Scottish ancestors, and richly endowed with intellectual gifts as well as graces of manner, seldom united conspicuously in the same individual, William Murray started in life under highly favourable auspices and with every chance of success. This splendid career borrows none of its lustre from heroic struggles against adverse fortune. "My success in life," he once observed with a humility characteristic of great men, "is not very remarkable. My father was a man of rank and fashion; early in life I was introduced into the best company, and my circumstances enabled me to support the character of a man of fortune. To these advantages I chiefly owe my success." Pemberton spent several of his early years in the cell of a debtor's prison, studied law and literature within its walls, and eventually reached the rank and dignity of which Mansfield was so proud. Lord Kenyon, the apprentice of a Welsh attorney, had to encounter years of penury—dining in Chancery Lane, while a law student, upon a few coppers—before he was called to preside over the king's bench. Lord Tenterden, to whose statesmanship a well-known act of parliament designated by his name bears perpetual testimony, was the son of a Canterbury barber, and the unsuccessful candidate for an appointment in the cathedral choir. The triumphs of such men over circumstances under whose weight more feeble minds would be crushed, are the elements out of which thrilling stories might be written. William Murray succeeded to the inheritance of rank, of family influence, of talent, and of moderate means. With steadiness of character, it fell in with the natural flow of things that a scion of the Stormont-Murrays should have duly graduated in Oxford; that he should have found himself upon his call to the bar in the centre of a brilliant society, "drinking champagne with the wits;" that he should have outstripped his less fortunate and less able rivals, received his silk in good time, and passed through the grades of state apppointments; that he should have been raised to the second judicial seat, and created a peer of the realm; and, finally, that he should have won imperishable glory as a judge and a statesman. William Murray was the eleventh child of the fifth Viscount Stormont, by the only daughter of David Scot of Scotsarvet, the heir male of the Scots of Buccleuch. He was born on the 2nd of March, 1705, in the ancient palace of Scone—a palace which stood upon the ruins of the famous abbey where the kings of Scotland had been crowned from remotest times, and whence the stone upon which they were anointed was removed to Westminster by Edward I. Viscount Stormont received but a slender dowry with his wife, inasmuch as the wealth of the Buccleuchs had been bestowed upon the daughter of the last earl, to secure an alliance through her marriage with the duke of Monmouth. With a large family of fourteen children, it required not only a rigid denial of costly luxuries, but a certain amount of good household management, to bring them up in a manner worthy of their birth and connections. A noble biographer has placed on record, that "for these highborn imps oatmeal porridge was the principal food which their father could provide, except during the season for catching salmon, of which a fishery near his house, belonging to his estate, brought them a plentiful supply." William spent the years of his boyhood at the Perth grammar-school, where he exhibited a decided predilection for study, and acquired a fair amount of elementary learning. Having attained his fourteenth year, his father had some thoughts of sending him to St. Andrews; but he never was a student at that university, though statements to that effect have gained currency. The next step taken in the education of William was pretty much decided by the representations made by Viscount Stormont's second son, James, at this time residing in London. James was fifteen years older than William; an enthusiastic Jacobite, fully committed to the cause of the Pretender; and closed his days in exile. Anxious that his brother should be indoctrinated in the same high-tory principles, his father was prevailed upon to place William under the tuition of Atterbury, then master of Westminster school, He arrived in London on the 8th May, 1718. A year had scarcely elapsed before he was elected king's scholar; and in 1723 he entered himself of Christ Church, with a foundation scholarship. Through the liberal offices of Lord Foley—which Murray consented to accept upon conditions respectful to his patron and consistent with his own self-respect—he became a member of Lincoln's inn on the 23rd of April, 1724. He obtained the degree of M.A. in June, 1730; and in the Michaelmas term next following was called to the bar. While at Oxford Murray gained a prize for a Latin poem; with that exception his college fame never rose above the level of mediocrity. Without eschewing the classics and mathematics, he educated himself more expressly for his profession. Having acquired a knowledge of ancient and modern history—ample, accurate, and minute—he devoted himself to the study of ethics, of elocution, and of the Roman civil law. The custom of reading under a barrister in chambers was not in vogue at this period; so that Murray's legal knowledge was the result of private study. Biographers have inaccurately stated that Murray "never knew the difference between total destitution and an income of £3000 a-year." It was not so. That large sum was not reached until after seven years of hard labour as a junior barrister. Through recommendations from his Scottish friends business soon began to flow in from the North, in the nature of appeals from the court of session to the house of lords. Two years after his call to the bar he held a brief for the respondent in the case of Patterson versus Graham, and attracted much notice. The respondent was one of the thousand eager speculators who had been duped by the South Sea Bubble; and as the knavish practices of the concoctors and agents of that calamitous scheme were likely to be brought forth and unravelled in open court, the house of lords was crowded with anxious listeners. Murray's gallant conduct in a contest where defeat was from the outset inevitable, made a deep impression in his favour upon the auditory, which the unsuccessful issue entirely failed to counteract. But the speech which placed Murray at the head of the bar was that delivered in 1738 for the defendant, Colonel Sloper, in an action of crim. con.—Cibber versus Sloper. It was after this success that the duchess of Marlborough sent him a general retainer, with a thousand guineas, of which Murray returned nine hundred and ninety-five, with the explanation that "the professional fee, with
