Cockburn, HENRY, Scottish judge, was born 26th October 1779, perhaps at Cockpen, but more probably in the Parliament Close of old Edinburgh. He entered the High School in 1787, and the university in 1793, 'being kept,' in his own words, 'nine years at two dead languages which we did not learn.' Dugald Stewart's lectures, then, 'were like the opening of the heavens,' they 'changed one's whole nature;' and through a debating club he became the companion of Jeffrey, Horner, and Brougham, from whom he imbibed Whig opinions, greatly to the annoyance of the hereditary Toryism of his family. He was called to the Scottish bar in 1800; and in 1807 his uncle, the all-powerful Lord Melville, gave him an advocate-deputeship—a non-political post, from which, on political grounds, he 'had the honour of being dismissed' in 1810. He rose, however, to share with Jeffrey the leadership of the bar, and with Jeffrey was counsel for three prisoners accused of sedition (1817-19). His powers were better adapted for success with a popular than with a professional tribunal. Simple, clear, and impressive, at times pathetic, humorous at times, and, when he pleased, eloquent, but always unaffected, always Scotch, he would urge his case with an earnestness and candour that was all but irresistible. A zealous supporter by pen as well as by tongue of parliamentary reform, he became Solicitor-general for Scotland under the Grey ministry in 1830; had the chief hand in drafting the Scottish Reform Bill; was elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University (1831); in 1834 was made, as Lord Cockburn, a judge of the Court of Session; and three years later a lord of justiciary. He died, 26th April 1854, at Bonally Tower, his beautiful home by the base of the Pentlands since his marriage in 1811, and was buried near Jeffrey in the Dean Cemetery, Edinburgh.
in Heraldry.
Besides five or six pamphlets, and as many articles in the Edinburgh Review, dealing mostly with legal and parliamentary reform, Cockburn was author of an admirable Life of Jeffrey (1852), and of four posthumous works—Memorials of his Time (1856), Journal, 1831-44 (2 vols. 1874), Circuit Journeys (1888), and Examination of Trials for Sedition in Scotland (2 vols. 1888). The first three of these form a kind of autobiography, into which are woven characteristic anecdotes of old-world Scottish life, and graphic sketches of the men who composed the brilliant circle of Edinburgh society in the first four decades of the 19th century. Withal they illustrate his love of nature and veneration for antiquity.