Upon the 8th day of November, 1756, Murray was sworn in before Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, and created a peer by the title of Baron Mansfield, of Mansfield, in the county of Nottingham, and three days afterward he sat for the first time in the Court of King’s Bench.  “Over that great court,” says Lord Brougham, “he presided for thirty years, and his administration of its functions during that long period shed a luster alike upon the tribunal and the judge.”  During that period, too, but two cases occurred in which his opinion was not unanimously adopted by his brethren; and of the many thousand judgments which he pronounced but two were reversed.  In all his time no bill of exceptions was ever tendered to his direction, and “all suitors sanguine in their belief of being entitled to succeed” were eager to bring their causes to be tried before him.  There were drawbacks to Murray’s complete success in the House of Commons; there were qualities which he lacked whilst practicing at the bar.  Mansfield wanted nothing to make up the perfect portrait of a British judge.  In the Legislature he was helpless in attack; and both in the House of Commons and in the House of Lords he exhibited on more than one occasion a want of moral courage as humiliating to his friends as it proved profitable to his foes; at the bar, learned and able though he always was, yet wary circumspection even there cramped his powers and deprived him of the transcendent reputation which other advocates have earned.  On the bench there was neither fear nor hesitation, neither undue caution nor lack of energy, to impede his great intelligence.  There he sat, as above the common passions of humanity, surveying its doings with a mind unobscured by prejudice, as wide in its grasp as it was masculine it capability.  His clearness of apprehension, his perspicuity of statement, his perfect self-command, his vast knowledge of every kind, were amongst the least of his qualifications for his high station.  More preeminently than all was his heroic and almost chivalric devotion to the judicial office; his stern and unflinching love of justice, as distinguished from “the puny technicalities of an obscure walk;” his superiority to the favors of the great or to the clamors of the many, and his unquestioned spotless integrity.  During a portion of his lengthened judicial career Lord Mansfield held a seat in the Cabinet, but nobody thought of questioning the purity of his judgments on that account.  Toward the close of his judicial life Lord George Gordon was tried for Inciting the rioters who set fire to Lord Mansfield’s house and destroyed his property.  Lord Mansfield was the presiding judge on that memorable occasion, and it was upon his exposition of the law of high treason to the jury, and after his summing up, that Lord George Gordon was acquitted.

“The benefits conferred by this accomplished judge upon the Court and upon its suitors,” says one of his biographers,—­