It is certainly not extraordinary that the life of the great Earl of Mansfield has been contemplated by his biographer until a sense of humility has been engendered, and eloquent admiration for transcendent intelligence evoked.  From among a host this luminary stands forth.  Faultless he was not, as we shall presently see; but his failings, whatever they may have been, in no way obscured the luster of a genius that gave sublimity to the most prosaic of pursuits, and, in the teeth of prejudice, vindicated law against the toils of the narrow-minded and the opprobrium of ages.  What Bacon proved to philosophy Mansfield in his day became, in a measure, to his own cherished science; and, as Coke affected commiseration for the author of the Novum Organum, so the fettered slaves of forms and rules in later times pitied and reproached Lord Mansfield for his declared unconquerable preference for the spirit of justice to the unilluminated letter of the law.

Nature and education prepared William Murray for the very highest forensic distinction, and his career is chiefly remarkable for the certain, though gradual steps, by which he reached it.  His success was the legitimate and logical result of the means sedulously taken to obtain it.  Had William Murray failed to win his race, it would have been because he had dropped down dead on the course, or violent hands had forbidden his progress.  The conditions of victory were secured at starting, in his own person, let the competitors be whom they might.  The spirit of the boy was as ambitious of worldly glory as the spirit of the man looked for undying fame; from first to last, from the beginning of the century until the close of it, the same application, the same aptitude, the same self-devotion, and the same clear, unruffled, penetrating judgment, were visible in Mansfield’s useful and protracted life.

The younger son of a poor Scotch lord, whose family favored the Stuart cause, William Murray quitted his school at Perth on the 15th of March, 1718, being then thirteen years of age, and started on the back of a pony for the city of London.  His destination was the house of an apothecary, who, emigrating from Perth, had settled in London, and was now commissioned to see the son of his former patron safely deposited at Westminster School, where it was hoped the young student would win, in due time, his Oxford scholarship.  Upon the 8th of May, just two months after the journey was commenced, the pony completed his task, and the rider resolutely began his own.  He soon distinguished himself by his classical attainments, and, according to Mr. Welsby, “his superiority was more manifest in the declamations than in any of the other exercises prescribed by the regulations of the school.”  In May, 1723, after a severe examination, William Murray took his place as first on the list of King’s scholars who were to proceed to Christ Church.