To the original members were afterwards added several remarkable persons, amongst whom were Josiah Wedgwood, Bennet Langton (Dr Johnson's friend), and, later, Zachary Macaulay, Henry Brougham and James Stephen.
Accordingly, in 1811, Brougham carried through parliament a bill declaring the traffic to be a felony punishable with transportation.
His main object, however, like that of Brougham, was the amelioration of the law, more by the abolition of cumbrous technicalities than by the assertion of new and striking principles.
Following in the path struck out by Miss Strickland in her Lives of the Queens of England, and by Lord Brougham's Lives of Eminent Statesmen, he at last produced, in 1849, The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of England, from the earliest times till the reign of King George IV., 7 vols.
These faults are painfully apparent in the lives of Hardwicke, Eldon, Lyndhurst and Brougham, and they have been pointed out by the biographers of Eldon and by Lord St Leonards.'