His body was privately buried two days afterwards, under the communion table in the chancel of the church of New Brentford; over his grave was placed a stone bearing an inscription on a brass plate, which the odiousness of his memory speedily caused to be defaced. In Howell's Familiar Letters, we find the following graphic account of his death and testamentary dispositions, with a sketch of his character. The letter is addressed to the Viscount Savage, of whose manorial courts Noy had, it seems, been formerly the steward:

66

My Lord,-The old steward of your courts, Master AttorneyGeneral Noy, is lately dead, nor could Tunbridge waters do him any good; though he had good matter in his brain, he had, it seems, il materials in his body; for his heart was shrivelled like a leather penny purse when he was dissected, nor were his lungs sound. Being such a clerk in the law, all the world wonders he left such an odd will, which is short, and in Latin; the substance of it is, that he having bequeathed a few legacies, and left his second son one hundred marks a year, and 5007. in money, enough to bring him up in his father's profession, he concludes, “Reliqua meorum omnia primogenito mco Edoardo, dissipanda, nec melius unquam speravi ego: I leave the rest of all my goods to my first-born Edward, to be consumed or scattered, for I never hoped better.", A strange and scarce a Christian will, in my opinion, for it argues uncharitableness. Nor doth the world wonder less that he should leave no legacy to some of your lordship's children, considering what deep obligations he had to your lordship; for I am confident he had never been attorneygeneral else.

"The vintners drink carouses of joy now he is gone, for now they are in hope to dress meat again, and sell tobacco, beer, sugar, and faggots; which, by a sullen capriccio of his, he would have restrained them from. He had his humours as other men, but certainly he was no great orator, yet a profound lawyer, and no man better versed in the records of the Tower. I heard your lordship often say, with what infinite pains and indefatigable study he came to his knowledge; and I never heard a more pertinent anagram than was made of his name-William Noy, I moyl in law. If an s be added, it may be applied to my own countryman Judge Jones, an excellent lawyer too, and a far more genteel man; William Jones, I moile in laws. No more now, but that I rest

"Your Lordship's most humble and
obliged servitor,

"Westminster, 1st Oct. 1635,

"J. H."

Steele tells us, in the 9th Number of the Tatler, that "a generous disdain and reflection upon how little he deserved from so excellent a father, reformed the young man, and made Edward, from an arrant rake, become a fine gentleman." Be this as it may, the young man, about two years after his father's death, fought a duel with Steele's in France.

The death of Sir William Noy, in proportion as it excited the joy of the popular party, was felt by the partisans of highchurch and prerogative policy as a heavy loss. "I have lost," said Laud," a near friend of him, and the Church the greatest she had of his condition, since she needed any such." No doubt there were some who, in the words of Fuller, "beheld his actions with a more favourable eye, as done in the pursuance of the place he had undertaken, who by his oath and office was to improve his utmost power to advance the profit of his master. Thus I see," adds the worthy chronicler, "that after their deaths, the memories of the best lawyers may turn clients, yea, and sue too in formâ pauperis, needing the good word of the charitable survivors to plead in their behalf."

The same author narrates, from his own personal recollection, an anecdote of Noy, which we give in his own words. "The goldsmiths of London had a custom once a year to weigh gold in the Star Chamber, in the presence of the privy council and the king's attorney. This solemn weighing, by a word of art, they call the pixe, and make use of so exact scales therein, that the master of the company affirmed that they would turn with the two-hundredth part of a grain. ‘I should be loath,' said the attorney Noy standing by, 'that all my actions should be weighed in those scales.' With whom," says honest Fuller, "I concur in relation of the same to myself."

The rejoicings of the anti-court party on Noy's death extended even to the stage; the players, whose license he had curtailed, made him the subject of a satirical comedy, under the title "A Projector lately dead," &c. Sir Anthony Weldon thus expends his bitter humour on his memory:" Formerly he was a great patriot, and the only searcher of precedents for the parliament; by which he grew so cunning, as he understood all the shifts which former kings had used to get money with.

This man the king sent for, told him he would make him his attorney; Noy, like a true cynic as he was, did for that time go away, not returning to the king so much as the civility of thanks; nor indeed was it worth his thanks; I am sure he was not worthy of ours. For after the Court solicitings had bewitched him to become the king's attorney, he grew the most hateful man that ever lived; he having been as great a deluge to this realm as the flood was to the whole world; for he swept away all our privileges, and in truth has been the cause of all those miseries this kingdom hath since been ingulphed in whether you consider our religion, (he being a great papist, if not an atheist, and the protector of all papists, and the raiser of them up into that boldness they were now grown unto), or if you consider our estates and liberties, which were impoverished and enthralled by multitudes of papist and illegal ways, which this monster was the sole author of."

:

It ought not to be forgotten, as an honourable testimony of Noy's discernment and discrimination, that he noticed the talents of Hale when yet a student at Lincoln's Inn, directed his studies, and contracted for him so warm a regard that, in consequence of their intimacy, Hale, as Burnet informs us, was called in the profession "Young Noy."

Sir William Noy was succeeded in his office of attorneygeneral by Robert Banks; and in the following year, on the removal of Sir Robert Heath from the chief-justiceship of the Common Pleas upon an accusation of bribery, Sir John Finch-Noy's great co-conspirator against the liberties of the people was raised to that seat; on which appointments this epigram was made :

Noy left behind him, in manuscript, the following legal works, all of which were published shortly after his death, and all give testimony to his knowledge and industry: "A Treatise of the Principal Grounds and Maxims of the Laws of England," first published in 1641, and frequently reprinted;

"Perfect Conveyancer, or several Select and Choice Precedents, collected partly by Sir William Noy," &c.; "The Complete Lawyer, or a Treatise concerning Tenures and Estates in Lands of Inheritance for Life," &c.; " Arguments of Law and Speeches." The volume of Reports which bears his name appears to have been published from loose notes, never prepared or intended for publication. Mr. Hargrave says, (Co. Litt. 54 a, n. (10)), “In an edition of Noy's Reports, penes editorem, there is the following observation upon them in manuscript: A simple collection of scraps of cases, made by Serjeant Size from Noy's loose papers, and imposed upon the world for the Reports of that vile prerogative fellow Noy.""

He left also, in manuscript, some valuable collections made by himself from the records in the Tower: one volume, containing "Collections concerning the King's maintaining his Naval Power, according to the Practice of his Ancestors," doubtless made on the occasion of the ship-money project; the other, "Concerning the Privileges and Jurisdiction of Ecclesiastical Courts."

We are informed by a contemporary author, that he was engaged, together with Lord Bacon, Lord Hobart, Serjeant Finch, Mr. Heneage Finch (afterwards Lord Nottingham), and other eminent lawyers, in the important work, undertaken at the suggestion of Lord Bacon, and by the direction of King James I., of “ reducing concurrent statutes to one clear and uniform law." According to Bacon, "a great deal of good pains were taken, and the work was advanced so far as to become of a great bulk;" but, like other important projects of the same period, it expired before it reached its completion.

SIR RANDAL CREWE.

Sir Randal, or Randolph, Crewe, Lord Chief Justice of England, with a high reputation for learning and honesty, during a short portion of the reigns of James and Charles I., was descended from an old and honourable family, settled in very ancient times at Crewe, in Cheshire; a place now become familiar to travellers from the junction there of several important lines of railway, which have transformed it, as if by the wand of the magician, from the quietest of sylvan hamlets

to a scene of the busiest traffic, resounding with the scream of engines and the clang of machinery. He was the eldest son of John Crewe, Esq., of Nantwich, in that county. Bred to the law, he was entered in due time of Lincoln's Inn, and called to the bar by that society. Without being able to trace his earlier career in his profession, except by the occasional mention of his name in the Reports, we find from Dugdale that in the 44th of Elizabeth (1601), he was selected as reader of his inn, and that on the 1st of July, 1614, he was called to the degree of the coif, and shortly afterwards nominated one of the king's serjeants. In 1614, Sir Randal (for he had already attained the honour of knighthood) was returned to the refractory parliament then summoned by James I., as knight of the shire for his native county, and he had the honour of being elected its speaker.

In the prosecution against the Earl of Somerset for the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury, Serjeant Crewe had allotted to him the fourth head of the evidence, namely, the "acts subsequent" which tended to show the prisoner guilty of the poisoning a duty which he appears to have discharged satisfactorily, and with temper. On the 26th of January, 1624-5, he was elevated at one step from the ranks of the bar to the dignity of Chief Justice of England ; “and therein," says Fuller, "served two kings, though scarce two years in his office, with great integrity." The same author thus records the honourable occasion of his dismissal from his office his resistance to the unconstitutional design of Charles I. to raise forced loans without the authority of parliament:" King Charles's occasions calling for speedy supplies of money, some great ones adjudged it unsafe to adventure on a parliament, (for fear, in those distempered times, the physic should side with the disease), and put the king to furnish his necessities by way of loan. Sir Randal being demanded his judgment of that design, and the consequence thereof (the imprisonment of recusants to pay it), openly manifested his dislike of such preter-legal courses; and thereupon, November 2nd, 1626, was commanded to forbear his sitting in his Court, and the next day was by writ discharged from his office; whereat he discovered no more discontentment than the weary traveller is offended when told that he is arrived