removed by the hand of God out of this sublunary life, and when that is done, the only subscribing witness now living, totally unknown to Mr. Walker, is met by him as he was walking up to Hampstead, with a show-box on his back, who asked him his name, and then, having learned his name, by the most fortunate coincidence of circumstances that ever happened, he takes him aside; hinc origo mali,'-a plot of gigantic villainy is hatched. The objections to this will were without form and void. Was the will executed? There had been judges who immediately rejected the testimony of witnesses who wished to invalidate their own act. They have said, We will not hear such a witness. There was a very great judge, whose name was never to be mentioned without honour, who died in 1737, Sir Joseph Jekyll, who tried a cause of this sort at Chester. He thought, on the whole, it was better to hear them. He received the witnesses, as tradition stated, at Chester Assizes; they swore against the will, and yet the will was supported. There was another case of the same sort tried before another judge in more modern times, Mr. Jolliffe's case. The three subscribing witnesses were called, and they all with one voice swore against the will. The jury found a verdict in favour of the will. The witnesses were afterwards indicted for perjury, and all found guilty. Two of the witnesses were not here to answer for themselves, but they were not men before whom a curtain was drawn, and who had an opportunity of shutting themselves up from the observance of the world; but they lived in the face of the world, and lived by their characters, and they went down to the grave without their characters being impeached. He had a right to consider them as giving their testimony; he had a right to consider them as standing in the witness-box giving their evidence, since their characters had been supported by evidence so respectable. Their character was only impeached by the testimony of one witness, who had come that day to contradict, on his oath, that which he solemnly attested at a former period of his life. If this will were to be set aside, what man could be comfortable or happy? Who could rest his head on his pillow, and say, 'I have looked to the right hand and to the left; I have settled all my worldly

affairs; I am now happy. I have disposed of my property, and have distributed it among those objects, that are the most worthy and dearest to me.' He would distrust the evidence of a man, whose testimony contradicted the act he had done in a former period of his life. If a person executed a will in articulo mortis, there might be more danger of imposition. But this lady made her will near twenty-two months before her death. Would it be asked, "Will you disinherit the next of kin?' That would depend on circumstances. Many had actually done it, and some with vast applause. An Earl of Lincoln, who thought he could not consistently with his character and his honour support the measures of a minister, gave up his situation, and lost his pension. This conduct was so much admired by Lord Torrington that he left him his whole fortune, though he did not know the noble lord, and all the world were ready to clap their hands at the act. If this will should be doubted, it will invite people to discuss every will in a court of justice. The case is in hands where justice will be done. If there is room to pause, you will pause; but if the case is clearer than the sun, you will deliver your sentiments on it by the verdict you will give."

The jury immediately found a verdict for the plaintiff; and set the mind of the judge at ease by securing those rights of property which he so highly valued. In guarding these rights against fraud or violence, and enforcing the rigours of the penal code, this chief criminal judge of England trusted too much to the effects of terror. To use his own words, he thought it very dreadful that men of business should be robbed by those they employed,' and he inflicted death as the most terrible, and therefore the most preventive, punishment. Not that he was a cruel or sanguinary man; could he have consulted his own feelings he would have borne a bloodless ermine, but he thought that his duty to the country required the passing of that sentence, the most dread and painful part of the judicial office, which, at whatever cost to his feelings, the magistrate must perform. The number of capital convictions and executions on his circuits have been adduced to prove that he exercised a more mer

ciful discretion than many of his brother judges, who appear to have inverted the celebrated saying of Wilkes, and to have resolved that," the best possible use to which you can put a criminal is to hang him." Wilberforce makes a note of his gratification at finding how favourable the Chief Justice was to penitentiaries, and to a less sanguinary system of penal laws.

An interesting anecdote of Lord Kenyon's sensibility was related in the House of Commons by Mr. Morris in the debates of 1811. Of the occurrence that gentleman had been an eye-witness. "On the Home circuit," he said, "some years since a young woman was tried for having stolen to the amount of forty shillings in a dwelling house. It was her first offence, and was attended with many circumstances of extenuation. The prosecutor appeared, as he stated, from a sense of duty; the witnesses very reluctantly gave their evidence, and the jury still more reluctantly their verdict of guilty. The judge passed sentence of death; she instantly fell lifeless at the bar. Lord Kenyon, whose sensibility was not impaired by the sad duties of his office, cried out in great agitation from the bench: I don't mean to hang you: will nobody tell her I don't mean to hang her?' I then felt," he justly added, "as I now feel, that this was passing sentence, not on the prisoner, but on the law." This deserved reproach never startled the learned judge, who was a devout believer in the perfection of the penal laws, and, without rising superior to the prejudices of the age in which he lived, gained a reputation for mercy above his colleagues, by yielding more frequently than they did to the impulses of compassion. His humanity, active in cases of life and death, so far as his conscience would allow, was less alert in behalf of those criminals to whom secondary punishments had been awarded, and never slumbered so soundly, as when a fashionable libertine was to be amerced in damages, a seditious libeller to be sent to gaol, or a knavish attorney to be struck off the rolls.

CHAPTER_III.

THE LIFE OF LORD KENYON ·

-continued.

IN behalf of poor offenders, ignorant and deluded, the tools of more knavish men, the humane sympathies of Lord Kenyon were often forcibly excited. We find a remarkable instance of this in the case of Spence, where his pity for the sorry state of the defendant subdued, in a great degree, the inveterate displeasure which he felt against his crime. He was tried for a publication steeped in sedition of the worst kind. "We must destroy all private property in land. The landholders are like a warlike enemy quartered upon us for the sake of raising contributions, therefore any thing short of a total destruction of the power of these Sampsons will not do; and that must be accomplished, not by simple shaving, which leaves the roots of their strength to grow again: no! we must scalp them, or else they will soon recover, and pull our temple of liberty about our ears. The man excited compassion at his trial by his wretched appearance, and the pitiable fanaticism with which he was possessed, for he was honest. He called himself in his defence 'the unfeed advocate of the disinherited race of Adam.' When brought up for judgment, he gave the following simple statement of his treatment in Newgate *: -

"Perhaps, my lords, I have entertained too high an opinion of human nature, for I do not find mankind very grateful clients. I have very small encouragement indeed to rush into a prison, on various accounts; for in the first place the people without treat me with the contempt due to a lunatic, and the people within treat me as bad or worse than the most notorious felon among them; and what with redeeming and ransoming my toes from being pulled off with a string while in bed, and paying heavy and manifold fees,

*Southey's Essays.

there is no getting through the various impositions." He was sentenced to a fine of 20l. and one year's imprisonment in Shrewsbury Gaol; a sentence so lenient (compared with cotemporary sentences in other cases of the sort) as to show that the individual was very properly regarded by Lord Kenyon with compassion. He invariably shielded the working and poorer classes from oppression, when wily informers sought to harass them with the rigours of the law. The late Mr. Wilberforce used to tell what pleasure he had felt at the indignation evinced by the honest Chief Justice, when, in the course of a prosecution against a man for exercising the trade of a tailor, without having served an apprenticeship, it appeared that other prosecutions were pending against him for several acts done in the same day. "Prosecute the man," exclaimed Lord Kenyon, "for different acts in one day! Why not sue for penalties on every stitch!" On another occasion, when a tradesman was assailed with litigious prosecution for not having completed an apprenticeship of seven years under the 5th of Elizabeth, Lord Kenyon observed, that the ink was scarcely dry with which the statute was drawn, when the legislature repented of it;' and he put the impolicy and hardship of the proceeding so forcibly to the counsel that he consented for very shame to abandon the prosecution.

There was one class of criminal cases, that of blasphemy, the trial of which, from the judge's strong religious feelings, exacerbated them to excess. In their progress, the violent struggle between the indignation of the man, and his wish to preserve the impassive temperament proper for his office, became often painfully manifest. Blame has been imputed to him for his vacillation in the trial of Williams the bookseller. A more dignified firmness and undisturbed equanimity might perhaps be desiderated; but the narrative of his conduct carries its own apology with it, and the candid explanation he afterwards made, enhances, rather than detracts from, his judicial character. The following is a short history of the case.

A bookseller was tried before him for blasphemy in publishing Paine's Age of Reason. On the clerk proceeding