for their connection with " the Plot," on the oaths of Gates and Bedloe; then thinking the King's feelings ran the other way, he suddenly turned round on that pair, scoffed at their testimony, and let the objects of his former hatred go uncharged. After Scroggs came Pemberton, who was not sufficiently unscrupulous, and was therefore dismissed to make way for Saunders, who was a cor pulent beastly sot—having generally a pint of ale at his elbow on the bench, and very offensive to every one who sat near him. His constant abode was with an old tailor near Temple Bar. Passing over the " blood-battered " Jeffreys, and the tools of James II., we come to the Revolution. The new order of Judges is worthily headed by Sir John Holt. He was the first to lay down the law, that a slave cannot breathe in England; he also ended the practice of bringing a man's former mis deeds to tell against him on trial, and the practice of bringing prisoners fettered to the bar. He put down prosecutions for witch craft; in eleven cases he directed the ac quittal of the old women; he went further,
and directed that every witch prosecutor should himself be tried as a cheat, where upon the crime of witchcraft suddenly ceased. The biography of the bench hencefor ward loses the interest which belongs to political movement and personal peculiar ities. The more constitutional behavior of the rulers, and the quieter course of justice, produce a sameness in which the individual sinks in the office. There is very little at traction in the legal history of the Ryders, Wilmots, Parkers, Pratts, Raymonds and Lees. Lord Campbell closes his list with Lord Mansfield, a man variously estimated in his time, but whose chief merit with posterity is the framing of the Commercial Code of England, which Holt had already been trying to develop. Into the particulars of his life we have no time to enter. We have got over more ground than we expected when we began to cream these volumes. If the reader thinks our gossip to scant, we have put him on the track of finding as much as will suffice him. Chambers Edinburgh Journal.
