Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 19.djvu/371

 and polish of his articles give them a literary value independent of the subject. Fonblanque wrote slowly and rewrote much. He did not consider his early articles in daily newspapers worth reprinting, and when at a later period he was tempted by great offers to write in the ‘Morning Chronicle,’ he felt himself unequal to the task and soon abandoned it. No editor, perhaps, has ever more strongly impressed his personality upon his journal, or habitually written in a more individual and recognisable style, even to the risk of monotony. His slowness of composition makes the great extent and overwhelming proportion of his contributions to the ‘Examiner’ the more remarkable. His negative bent made him before all things a censor and a critic, and disabled him from taking broad surveys of measures and men. His strong positive views on legislation, derived from Bentham, made his journalistic work in that department more fruitful if less brilliant. In politics he was no revolutionist, but a staunch radical reformer, whose hostility to abuses did not involve hostility to institutions, some few excepted, which he thought decisively condemned by his utilitarian standard. He may be taxed with occasional injustice to individuals, but not with deliberate unfairness; he was in purpose thoroughly impartial, and never employed his powers of satire for the mere sake of giving pain. Being sarcastic he naturally passed for a cynic, but the character did him great injustice. He seems to have been shy and sensitive, patient in a never-ending contest with ill-health and domestic unhappiness, scrupulously honourable and delicate in all personal relations, and subdued in manner, except when he held the pen or became animated in discussion. All his friends who have left notices of him celebrate his social charm and his disinterested kindness. He was a brilliant talker, a finished scholar, and a theoretical student of music and art.



FONBLANQUE, JOHN DE GRENIER (1760–1837), jurist, son of Jean de Grenier Fonblanque, a naturalised Englishman and banker in London, who was descended from an ancient and noble Huguenot family of Languedoc, was born in 1760. He was educated at Harrow and Oxford; became a student of the Middle Temple, and was called to the bar by that society 24 Jan. 1783. He soon obtained a good practice as an equity lawyer. He is said to have caused quite a sensation by disputing the then established, but now exploded, doctrine of scintilla juris. He was leading counsel on behalf of the merchants of London in their opposition to the Quebec Bill of 1791, and pleaded their cause at the bar of the House of Commons. By the influence of the Duke of Bedford he sat for Camelford, 1802–6. In 1804 he was made king's counsel. Fonblanque was a steady whig and a personal friend of the Prince of Wales, for whom he is supposed to have written the letters addressed to George III on his exclusion from the army. He died 4 Jan. 1837, and was interred in the Temple Church, in the vault belonging to the Middle Temple, of which society he was senior bencher. At the time of his death Fonblanque was called ‘Father of the English Bar.’ Writing to one of his sons Lord Lyndhurst says of him: ‘I have known jurists as profound as your father, but I have known no one who was so perfect a master of the philosophy of law.’ In 1786 Fonblanque married the daughter of Colonel John Fitzgerald, by whom he left three sons and a daughter. He assumed the old family prefix de Grenier in addition to the name of Fonblanque by royal license in May 1828. Fonblanque edited the ‘Treatise on Equity’ ascribed to [q. v.], with such additions and improvements that it became almost a new work. It enjoyed considerable reputation as an authority on the subject, and went through several editions (5th ed. 1820). He also wrote two tracts, ‘A Serious Exhortation to the Electors of Great Britain’ (1791?), and ‘Doubts as to the Expediency of adopting the Recommendation of the Bullion Committee,’ 1810.



FONBLANQUE, JOHN SAMUEL MARTIN DE GRENIER (1787–1865), legal writer, eldest son of [q. v.], was born in Brook Street, Grosvenor Square, London, in March 1787. He was educated at the Charterhouse and at Caius College, Cambridge, where he was one of the founders of the Union Debating Society. He also kept his terms at Lincoln's Inn. At college he burst a blood-vessel and was advised change for his health, whereupon, having obtained a commission in the 21st fusiliers, he served with the regiment in Cadiz and Gibraltar, and in Italy under Lord W. Bentinck, by whom he was appointed deputy judge advocate-general. He took an active part in the war between Great Britain