Chancery, by which the fees paid out of the pockets of suitors into those of the officers of the court have been unlawfully augmented. He shows that this practice is pernicious to the administration of justice, and burdensome to the people; and that it tends to benefit the judges (chiefly Lord Eldon) in a pecuniary point of view, because it increases the value of their patronage, and because valuable patronage is money. He then particularly directs his attention to the augmentation of fees made in 1807 by Lord Chancellor Erskine and his Mentor, as he calls Sir William Grant, then the Master of the Rolls. He asserts we think, fairly enough-that the increase of fees, which are sooner or later, in part or in whole, to find their way into the pocket of the judge, is a species of bribery, and upon this he has a whimsical passage, which he quotes from that great common law authority (an authority, by the way, which he laughs at) Mr. Sergeant Hawkins. "Bribery," says the learned sergeant, "is sometimes taken for the receiving or offering of any undue reward, by or to any person whatsoever, whose ordinary profession or business relates to the administration of public justice, in order to incline him to do a thing against the known rules of honesty and integrity; for the law abhors [inuendo the common law, that is to say, it makes the judges abhor] any the least tendency to corruption in those who are any way concerned in its administroiion."

Here the learned sergeant waxes stronger and stronger in sentimentality, as he ascends into the heaven of hypocrisy, where he remains during the whole of that and the next long section. Abhor corruption?" Oh yes, even as a dog does carrion.

'Be this as it may, note with how hot a burning iron he stamps bribery and corruption on the foreheads of such a host of sages:-of Lord Erskine (oh fie! isn't he dead?) Sir William Grant (oh fie! was he not an able judge?) and Lord Eldon, the loid of lords, with his etceteras the inferior chiefs'

This seems to us as funny as any thing in Hooke's farces, and a great

deal more true.

This augmentation was afterwards

confirmed by Lord Eldon, although at the same time he confessed that he doubted whether it was legal; but all this done with so much cunning, that the persons who ought most to have complained were silenced by the name of Lord Erskine, upon whom Lord Eldon, or, as Mr. Bentham calls him, John the Second, had taken care that all the blame should fall. We must give this in the Bencher's own words :

Note here the felicity of Lord Eldon : the profit reaped by him from the Hegira of a few months. We shall soon see, how, from one of the most unexpectable of all incidents, the grand design of the grand master of delay experienced a delay of six years: a delay, which, like so many of his own making, might never have found an end, but for the short-lived apparent triumph and unquiet reign of the pretenders to the throne. When, upon their expulsion, the legitimates resumed their due omnipotence, it seemed to all who were in the secrets of providence-and neither Mr. Bailey nor Mr. Justice Park, nor any other chaplain of Lord Eldon's, could entertain a doubt of it-that it was only to give safety and success to this grand design of his, that had been permitted. The chancellor, by the momentary ascendency of the intruders whom the first visible step in the track of execution was taken, being a Whig,-not only was a precedent set, and ground thus made for the accommodation of Lord Eldon, but a precedent which the Whigs, as such, stood effectually estopped from controverting. Poor Lord Erskine-all that he had had time to do, was to prepare the treat: to prepare it for his more fortunate predecessor and successor. Scarce was the banquet on the table, when up rose from his nap the "giant refreshed," and swept into his wallet, this, in addition to all the other sweets of office. As to poor Lord Erskine, over and above his paltry four thousand pounds a-year, nothing was left him, but to sing with Virgil-Sic vos non nobis mellificatis apes.'

He then shows that the same practice has been attempted, and with similar success, in the other courts; and, after alternating tickling the judges till they are ready to laugh, and then beating them till he makes them cry, he apostrophizes Mr. Peel and Mr. Canning in a manner which the latter at least must feel, and which is perhaps the more forcible from its being so wholly unexpected, and so different from all the preceding parts of the book.

Oppose now, if you have face for it, "the dragging the judges of the land" before the Catos whom you are addressing -the tribunal of Parliament. Fear no longer, Mr. Peel, if ever you feared before, the obtaining credence for your assurancethat it was by Lord Eldon his majesty was advised to commission Lord Eldon to report upon the conduct of Lord Eldon. Mr. Canning-you, who but two years ago-so light in the scale of sentimentalism is public duty weighed against private friendship, (and such friendship!)-you who, so lately, uttered the so solemn promise never to give a vote that should cast imputation upon Lord Eldon, watch well, sir, your time, and when, these imputations having come on, votes come to be given on them, repress then, if possible, your tears, and, wrapping yourself up in your agony, hurry out of the House.'

After this the Bencher gets a little wild, and goes so far as to call, in plain English, these venerable and eminent persons swindlers.' He says that this violation of the law by the judges was greater than that effected by the judges of Charles II. and attempted by those, of James II. and if he does not prove it it is not his fault. He is only withheld from asserting that Lord Eldon is most unfit for his office by the recollection of Lord Redesdale, whom he introduces in the following whimsical

note :

I would willingly have said most unfit, but truth, as will be seen, forbids me.

'Saul and Jonathan were Lord Eldon and

Lord Redesdale. Lord Eldon, AttorneyGeneral; Lord Redesdale, Solicitor-General: chancellors-Lord Eldon, of England; Lord Redesdale, of Ireland. Scholars of the school of Fabius, but with one difference-by the Roman cunctation, every thing was perfected; by the English and Irish, marred.

'The London laid a wager with the Dublin chancellor, which should, in a given time, do least business. Dublin beat London hollow.'

The lord chancellor is universally praised, even by his enemies, for his courteous manners. The Duke of Glo'ster, in the play, says, 'I can smile and smile,' and so forth. Mr. Bentham, in the enumeration of Lord Eldon's virtues, cannot forget this.

Beyond all controversy,- recognised not less readily by adversaries than by dependants, one politico-judicial virtue his lordship has, which, in his noble and learned bosom, has swelled to so vast a

magnitude, that, like Aaron's serpent-rod, it shows as if it had swallowed up all the rest. In the public recognition of it, trembling complaint seeks an emollient for vengeance; decorous and just satire, a mask. After stabbing the Master of the Abuses through and through with facts, Mr. Vizard takes in hand the name of this virtue--and, inuendo, this is the only one that can be found, lays it like a piece of goldbeater's skin on the wounds. That which beauty, according to Anacreon, is to woman,-courtesy, according to every body, is to Lord Eldon: to armour of all sortsoffensive as well as defensive-a matchless and most advantageous substitute. With the exception of those, whom, while doubting, he is ruining, and, without knowing any thing of the matter, plundering,-this it is that keeps every body in good humour: every body-from my lord duke, down to the barrister's servant-clerk. Useful here, useful there, useful every where,—of all places, it is in the cabinet that it does knights' service. It is the court stickingplaster, which, even when it fails to heal, keeps covered all solutions of continuity : it is the grand imperial cement, which keeps political corruption from dissolving in its own filth. Never (said somebody once), never do I think of Lord Eldon or Lord Sidmouth, but I think of the aphorism of Helvetius-Celui qui n'a ni honneur ui humeur est un Courtisan parfait.'

And, having thus gone through the subject of Lord Eldon's conduct respecting fees, Mr. Bentham concludes with a summary of his character, and the feats he has performed for the instruction of posterity, or for the use of some future historian. It is written with all possible severity; the last passage, quaint as it is, is not less masterly in composition than it is vigorous in expression; and the whole convinces us that Mr. Bentham's oddity is affected, either for some purpose, or merely from a habit of indulging himself; but that, when he chooses, he can write as forcibly and as well as any other political author. How very poor any thing of Cobbett's would look beside this, merely in the way of bitterness, to say nothing of the comprehensive view which is taken, and of which Cobbett is wholly incapable !

To improve upon these hastily collected hints, and complete the investigation, would, if performed by a competent hand, assuredly be a most interesting as well as

useful work.

1. Nipping in the bud the spread of improvement over the habitable globe, ruining fortunes by wholesale, and involving in alarm and insecurity a vast proportion of the vast capital of the country, by wantonly scattered doubts, leaving the settlement of them to a future contingent time that may never come.

2. Rendering all literary property dependent upon his own inscrutable and uncontrollable will and pleasure.

3. Establishing a censorship over the press, under himself, with his absolute and inscrutable will, as censor: inviting, after publication with its expense has been completed, applications to himself for prohibition, with profit to himself in these, as in all other instances.

1

4. Leaving the line of distinction between cases for open and cases for secret judicature, for so long as there is any, at all times dependent on his own inscrutable and uncontrovertible will and pleasure, establishing and continually extending the practice of covering his own proceeding with the cloak of secrecy.

5. Rivetting, on the neck of the people, the continually pinching yoke of an aristocratical magistracy, by rendering all relief at the hands of the chancellor as hopeless, as, by artificial law expenses, and participation in sinister interest and prejudice, it has been rendered, at the hands of the judge.

6. On pretence of heterodoxy, by ex post facto law, made by a single judge for the purpose,-divesting parents of the guardianship of their own children.

7. Injecting into men's minds the poison of insincerity and hypocrisy, by attaching to pretended misdeeds, sufferings, from which, by an unpunishable and unprovable, though solemn act of insincerity, the supposed misdoer may, in every case, with certainty exempt himself.

8. In all manner of shapes, planting or fixing humiliation and anxiety in the breasts of all, who, on points confessedly too obscure for knowledge, oppose him, or refuse to join with him, in the profession of opinions, in relation to which there is no better evidence of their being really his, than the money and power he has obtained by the profession of them.

9. Pretending to establish useful truth by the only means by which success to pernicious falsehood can ever be secured. Proclaiming, in the most impressive manner, the falsehood and mischievousness of every thing that is called religion,-by punishing, or threatening to punish, what soever is said in the way of controverting the truth or usefulness of it.

10. Bearding Parliament, by openly declaring its incapacity to render unpunish

able any thing, to which the judges, with the words common law in their mouths, shall have been pleased to attach punishment, or take upon them to punish :-thus, by the assumed authority of himself, and those his creatures, keeping men under the rod of punishment, for habits of action, which, in consideration of their innoxiousness, had by Parliament been recently exempted from it: as if Parliament had not exempted men from declared and limited, but for the purpose of subjecting them to unconjecturable and unlimited punishment. Witness the Unitarians, and all others, who will not, at his command thus signified, defile themselves with insincerity, to purchase the common rights of subjects.

11. Doing that which even Parliament would not dare to do, and because 'Parliament would not dare to do it: doing it, with no other warrant, than this or that one of a multitude of words and phrases, be assigned at pleasure. to which oue import as well as another may Witness libel, blasphemy, malice, contra bons mores, conspiracy, Christianity is part and parcel of the law of the land: converting thus at pleasure into crimes, any the most perfectly innoxious acts, and even meritorious ones: substituting thus, to legislative definition and prohibition, an act of ex post facto punishment, which the most consummate legal knowledge would not have enabled a man to avoid, and as to which, in many an it should be avoided. instance, perhaps, it was not intended that

'All this--which, under a really existing constitution, grounded on the greatesthappiness-principle, would furnish matter for impeachment upon impeachment,-furnishes, under the imaginary matchless one, matter of triumph, claim to reward, and reward accordingly.

12. Poisoning the fountain of history, by punishing what is said of a departed public character on the disapproving side— while, for evidence and argument on the approving side, an inexhaustible fund of reward is left open to every eye: thus, by suppression, doubling the effect of subornation, of evidence. This by the hand of one of his creatures: his own hand, without the aid of that other, not reaching quite far enough.

'The title Master of the Abuses, which occurs in page 76, may perhaps have been thought to require explanation. It was suggested by that of Master of the Revels, coupled with the idea of the enjoyments in which he and his have for so many years been seen revelling by the exercise given to the functions of it.

"The Mastership of the Revels being abolished, or in disuse,-the Mastership of the Abuses appears to have been silently