THE ADVOCATE 453
VOL. 80 PART 3 MAY 2022
Dear Editor,
Re: “Bench and Bar”
(2021) 79 Advocate 637, quoting
Percy B. Shelley’s “View
from the Euganean Hills”
Readers of the melodious lines
quoted in your July 2021 issue may
be interested to note that Percy
Bysshe Shelley also penned the
fiercest attack in English verse on a
sitting judge, Lord Eldon, in “To the
Lord Chancellor” (1817). Stanza II
exhibits the tone:
Thy country’s curse is on thee! Justice
sold,
Truth trampled, Nature’s landmarks
overthrown,
And heaps of fraud-accumulated
gold,
Plead, loud as thunder, at Destruction’s
throne.
Earlier that year, Lord Eldon had
denied Shelley custody of the two
young children of his marriage to
his abandoned wife, Harriet Westbrook,
after her apparent suicide.
In Lord Eldon’s words:
I consider this, therefore, as a case
in which the father has demonstrated
that he must, and does
deem it to be matter of duty which
his principles impose upon him, to
recommend to those whose opinions
and habits he may take upon
himself to form, that conduct in
some of the most important relations
of life, as moral and virtuous,
which the law calls upon me to
consider as immoral and vicious –
conduct which the law animadverts
upon as inconsistent with the
duties of persons in such relations
of life, and which it considers as
injuriously affecting both the interests
of such persons and those of
the community.
Shelley v. Westbrooke (1817),
Jac. 266 at 267; 37 E.R. 850 at 851
Nowadays, what family court
judges, or disappointed litigants,
write with such decision and vigour?
By this point in his life, Shelley
had got himself expelled from
LETTERS TO
THE EDITOR
By R.C. Tino Bella*
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