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, fourth son of the preceding, was born in 1727, studied some time at Oxford, which he quitted for the Temple, and after the usual course was admitted to the bar. He was one of his majesty’s counsel learned in the law, and a bencher of the lion society of the Inner Temple, but, although esteemed a very sound lawyer, he never rose to any distinguished eminence as a pleader. He was for some time recorder of Bristol, in which situation he was preceded by sir Michael Foster, and succeeded by Mr. Dunning, afterwards lord Ashburton. In May 1751 he was appointed marshal of the high court of admiralty in England, which he resigned in 1753, on being appointed secretary for the affairs of Greenwich hospital; and was appointed justice of the counties of Merioneth, Carnarvon, and Anglesey, 1757, and afterwards second justice of Chester, which he resigned about 1785, retaining only the place of commissary-general of the stores at Gibraltar. Had it been his wish, he might probably have been promoted to the EngU&h bench, but possessed of an ample income, having a strong bias to the study of antiquities, natural history, &c. he retired from the practice of the law, and applied his legal knowledge chiefly to the purposes of investigating curious questions of legal antiquity. His first publication, which will always maintain its rank, and has gone through several editions, was his “Observations on the Statutes,” 1766, 4to. In the following year he published “The Naturalist’s Calendar,” which was also favourably received. In 1773, desiring to second the wishes of the Rev. Mr. Elstob to give to the world the Saxon translation of Orosius, ascribed to king Alfred, in one vol. 8vo, he added to it an English translation and notes, which neither give the meaning, nor clear up the obscurities of the Latin or Saxon authors, and therefore induced some severe observations from the periodical critics. His next publication was, “Tracts on the probability of reaching the North Pole,” 1775, 4to. He was the first proposer ofthe memorable voyage to the north pole, which was undertaken by captain Phipps, afterwards lord Mulgrave: and on the event of it, he collected a variety of facts and speculations, to evince the practicability of such an undertaking. His papers were read at two meetings of the royal society, and not being admitted into their “Philosophical Transactions,” were published separately. -It must be allowed that the learned author bestowed much time and labour on this subject, and accumulated an amazing-quantity of written, traditionary, and conjectural evidence, in proof of the possibility of circumnavigating the pole; but when his testimonies were examined, they proved rather ingenious than satisfactory. In 1781 he published “Miscellanies on various subjects,” 4to, containing some of his papers in the Philosophical Transactions, and other miscellaneous essays composed or compiled by him, on various subjects of antiquity, civil and natural history, &c. His contributions to the Philosophical Transactions and to the Archaologia are numerous, as may be seen in the indexes of these works. He was a -member of both societies, and a vicepresident of that of the antiquaries, which office he resigned in his latter days on account of his bad state of health. He died after a lingering illness, at his chambers in the King’s Bench walk, Temple, March 11, 1SOO, aged 73, and was interred in the vault of the Temple church. Mr. Barrington was a man of amiable character, polite, communicative, and liberal.

, Lord Ashburton, an eminent lawyer, was the second son of Mr. John Dunning, of Ashburton, Co. Devon, attorney at law, by Agnes, daughter of Henry Judsham, of Old Port, in the parish of Modbury, in the same county. He was born at Ashburton, Oct. 18, 1731. At the age of seven he was sent to the free grammar-school of his native place, where, during five years, he made an astonishing progress in the classic languages. A book in Homer, or in the Æneid of Virgil, he would get by heart in the course of two hours, and on the top of the school-room, which was wainscotted, he drew out the diagrams of the first book of Euclid, and solved them at the age of ten. He has often been heard to say that he owed all his future fortune to Euclid and sir Isaac Newton. When he left school he was taken into his father’s office, where he remained until his attaining the age of nineteen, at which time sir Thomas Clarke, master of the rolls, (to whom his father had been many years steward) took him under his protection, and sent him to the Temple.

On the change of administration in 1782, which he had laboured to promote, he was appointed through the interest of his friend lord Shelburne, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, one of the places against which he and his friends had often objected as useless and burthensome to the public; and was about the same time advanced to the peerage by the title of lord Ashburton, of Ashburton, co. Devon. This honour, however, he did not long survive. His constitution, not perhaps originally good, was now worn down by indefatigable labour in his profession, and he died on a visit to Exmouth, August 18, 1783. His lordship married in 17SO, Elizabeth, daughter of John Baring, of Larkbear, co. Devon, esq. sister to John Baring, esq. M. P. for the city of Exeter at that time, and to the late sir Francis Baring, bart. By this lady he had two sons, John, who died in infancy, and Richard Barre, the present lord Ashburton.

Few men, in a career requiring the gifts of voice, person, and manner, had ever more difficulties to struggle with than the late lord Ashburton. He was a thick, short, compact man, with a sallow countenance, turned-up nose, a constant shake of the head, with a hectic cough which so frequently interrupted the stream of his eloquence, that to any other man this single defect would be a material impediment in his profession; and yet, with all these personal drawbacks, he no sooner opened a cause which required any exertion of talent, than his mind, like the sun, broke forth in the full meridian of its brightness. His elocution was at once fluent, elegant, and substantial, and partook more of the knowledge of constitutional law than that derived from the old books and reporters; not that he wasdeficient in all the depths of his profession, when an absolute necessity called him out (his praise being that of the best common lawyer as well as the best orator of his time); but his general eloquence partook more of the spirit than the letter of laws. His diction was of the purest and most. classical kind not borrowed from any living model of his time, either in the senate or at the bar it was his own particular formation and if it had any shade, it was perhaps its not being familiar enough, at times, to the common ear: he was, however, master of various kind of styles, and possessed abundance of wit and humour, which often not only '; set the court in a roar," but drew smiles from the gravity of the bench. His more finished speeches in the house of commons, and as a pleader before the bar of the house of lords, were many of them fine models of eloquence: he possessed the copia verbprum so fully that he seldom wanted a word; and when he did, he had great Jinesse in concealing it from his auditory, by repeating some parts of his last sentences by way of illustration: nobody had this management better, as by it he recovered the proper arrangement of his ideas, without any visible interruption in his discourse.

He preserved the dignity of a barrister very much in court, and frequently kept even the judges in check. When lord Mansfield, who had great quickness in discovering the jut of a cause, used to take up a newspaper by way of amusing himself, whilst Dunning was speaking, the latter would make a dead stop. This would rouse his lordship to say, “Pray go on, Mr. Dunning.” “No, my lord, not till your lordship has finished.” His reputation was as high with his fellow-barristers as with the public; he lived very much with the former, and had their affection and esteem. When lord Thurlow gave his first dinner as lord chancellor, he called Dunning to his right hand at table, in preference to all the great law otBcers; and when he hesitated to take the place, the other called out in his blunt way, “Why will you keep the dinner cooling in this manner?” He had that integrity in his practice, that on the opening of any cause, which he found by the evidence partook of any notorious fraud or chicanery, he would throw his brief over the bar with great contempt, and resort to his bag for a fresh paper. Whilst he was in the height of his practice, his father came to the treasurer’s office in the Middle Temple, to be one of the joint securities for a student performing his terms, <kc. Wh<-n he signed the bond, the clerk, seeing the name, asked him with some eagerness, whether he was any relation to the great Dunning? The old man felt the praise of his son with great sensibility, and modestly replied, “I am John Dunning’s father, Sir.” Few lawyers, without any considerable paternal estate at starting, and dying so young as lord Ashburton did, ever left such a fortune behind him; the whole amounting to no less than one hundred and eighty thousand pounds! Nor was this the hoard of a miser, for he always lived like a gentleman in the most liberal sense of the word, though, from his immense practice, he had no time to indulge in the arrangements of a regular establishment. During his illness, as a last resource he was advised to try his native air, and in going down to Devonshire accidentally met, at the same inn, his old colleague Wallace, lately attorneygeneral, coming to town on the same melancholy errand, to be near the best medical assistance. It was the lot of both to be either legal or political antagonists through the whole course of their lives, in which much keenness, and much dexterity of argument, were used on both sides: here, however, they met as friends, hastening to that goal, where the race of toil, contention, and ambition, was soon to have a final close. They supped together with as much conviviality as the nature of their conditions would admit, and in the morning parted wiih mutual promises of visiting each other early in the winter. These promises, however, were never performed: Dunning died in August, and Wallace in November.

Besides the answer to the Dutch memorial, lord Ashburton is supposed to have been concerned in a pamphlet on the law of libels, and to have written “A Letter to the Proprietors of East-India Stock, on the subject of lord dive’s Jaghire, occasioned by his lordship’s letter on that subject,” 1764, 8vo.

On the succession of the Shelburne administration, whose views of political affairs were in some respects more consonant to Mr. Jones’s principles than those of their predecessors, by the particular interest of lord Ashburton, he achieved the object to which for some time past he had anxiously aspired. In March 1783 he was appointed a judge of the supreme court of judicature at Fort William, on which occasion the honour of knighthood was conferred on him. In April following he rrvarried a young lady to whom he had been long attached, Anna Maria Shipley, eldest daughter of the bishop of St. Asaph. He had nowsecured, as his friend lord Ashburton congratulated him, “two of the first objects of human pursuit, those of ambition and love.”