Both Garrow and Thomas Erskine were of Scottish origin, both were called to the Bar by Lincoln's Inn, and both rose to prominence in London in the period in between the American and French Revolutions. Charismatic and with a superb analytical mind, the latter was in tune with the new chords of political thought of the eighteenth century. Whereas Garrow appears to have been driven largely by ambition, and to have been deeply conservative by nature if not always in action, Erskine throughout his long career deployed his considerable talents selflessly in the defence of wider Enlightenment values and of liberty. His younger contemporary, Henry Brougham, wrote an adulatory essay on him. Lord John Russell was no less effusive, attributing to Erskine ‘the tongue of Cicero and the soul of Hampden’. To a modern jurist, he was ‘the very greatest advocate who ever practised at the English Bar’, and could hold his own with the titans of antiquity. Even Lord Campbell, parsimonious of magnanimity, who in his biographies of the Lord Chancellors was held to have ‘added a new terror to death’, repeatedly extolled his virtues: ‘many generations may pass away before his equal is presented to the admiration of mankind.… As an advocate in the forum, I hold him to be without an equal in ancient or modern times.’ Those generations have passed and have thrown up many a fine advocate, but none that has surpassed him. If English law has a hero it is the Scot, Tom Erskine.