great vivacity, the dignity of the appellation. . . . Thus Halifax was a trimmer on principle. He was also a trimmer by the constitution both of his head and of his heart. His understanding was keen, sceptical, inexhaustibly fertile in distinctions and objections; his taste refined; his sense of the ludicrous exquisite; his temper placid and forgiving, but fastidious, and by no means prone either to malevolence or to enthusiastic admiration. Such a man could not long be constant to any band of political allies. He must not, however, be confounded with the vulgar crowd of renegades. For though, like them, he passed from side to side, his transition was always in the direction opposite to theirs. He had nothing in common with those who fly from extreme to extreme, and who regard the party which they have deserted with an animosity far exceeding that of consistent enemies. His place was between the hostile divisions of the community, and he never wandered far beyond the frontier of either. The party to which he at any moment belonged, was the party which, at that moment, he liked least, because it was the party of which at that moment he had the nearest view. He was therefore always severe upon his violent associates, and was always in friendly relations with his moderate opponents. Every faction in the day of its insolent and vindictive triumph incurred his censure; and every faction, when vanquished and persecuted, found in him a protector. To his lasting honour it must be mentioned that he attempted to save those victims whose fate has left the deepest stain both on the Whig and on the Tory name.'-Ib. pp. 242–245.

Charles expired on the 6th of February, 1685, and was immediately succeeded by his brother, who was lavish in his promises of maintaining the laws, and of upholding the Church of England. We have now,' said a loyal preacher, on the following Sunday, for our Church the word of a king, and of a king who was never worse than his word!' A bad omen, however, was furnished by the elevation of Sir George Jeffreys to the peerage with a seat in the Cabinet, and it soon became evident that in this was given a clue to the policy of the new reign. The unenviable notoriety of this infamous judge has loaded his memory with the deepest curses of his countrymen. England has never known his equal. He united the worst vices of a lowminded and brutal parasite, and was held in universal abhorrence, save by his royal master and the minions of the Court. The following extract from our author's sketch will sufficiently exhibit the man :—

'He was a man of quick and vigorous parts, but constitutionally prone to insolence and to the angry passions. When just emerging from boyhood he had risen into practice at the Old Bailey bar, a bar where advocates have always used a license of tongue unknown in Westminster Hall. Here, during many years, his chief business was to examine and cross examine the most hardened miscreants of a great capital. Daily conflicts with prostitutes and thieves, called out and exercised his powers so effectually that he became the most consum

mate bully ever known in his profession. All tenderness for the feelings of others, all self-respect, all sense of the becoming, were obliterated from his mind. He acquired a boundless command of the rhetoric in which the vulgar express hatred and contempt. The profusion of maledictions and vituperative epithets which composed his vocabulary could hardly have been rivalled in the fish market or the bear garden. His countenance and his voice must always have been unamiable. But these natural advantages,—for such he seems to have thought them, he had improved to such a degree that there were few who, in his paroxysms of rage, could see or hear him without emotion. Impudence and ferocity sate upon his brow. The glare of his eyes had a fascination for the unhappy victim on whom they were fixed. Yet his brow and eye were said to be less terrible than the savage lines of his mouth. His yell of fury, as was said by one who had often heard it, sounded like the thunder of the judgment day. These qualifications he carried, while still a young man, from the bar to the bench. He early became common serjeant and then recorder of London. As a judge at the City sessions he exhibited the same propensities which afterwards, in a higher post, gained for him an unenviable immortality. Already might be remarked in him the most odious vice which is incident to human nature, a delight in misery merely as misery. There was a fiendish exultation in the way in which he pronounced sentence on offenders. Their weeping and imploring seemed to titillate him voluptuously; and he loved to scare them into fits by dilating with luxuriant amplification on all the details of what they were to suffer. Thus, when he had an opportunity of ordering an unlucky adventuress to be whipped at the cart's tail, 'Hangman," he would exclaim, "I charge you to pay particular attention to this lady! Scourge her soundly, man! Scourge her till the blood runs down! It is Christmas, a cold time for Madam to strip in! See that you warm her shoulders thoroughly!" He was hardly less facetious when he passed judgment on poor Ludowick Muggleton, the drunken tailor who fancied himself a prophet. "Impudent rogue!" roared Jeffreys, "thou shalt have an easy, easy, easy punishment!" One part of this easy punishment was the pillory, in which the wretched fanatic was almost killed with brickbats.'-Ib. pp. 449-451.

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Richard Baxter, one of the most estimable of men, whose whole life had been a protest against the extremes of either party, the subtility of whose intellect unfitted him for partizanship, as the sanctity of his life brought him into fellowship with the good of every class, early experienced the ferocity of the Chief Justice. Baxter had complained in his Commentary on the New Testament of the persecutions to which Dissenters were subjected. Roger L'Estrange, the oracle of the Church, immediately sounded the alarm, and an information was filed against Baxter. The venerable Nonconformist applied for time to prepare his defence, and the scene which ensued will be best described in our author's words :

'It was on the day on which Oates was pilloried in Palace Yard that

the illustrious chief of the Puritans, oppressed by age and infirmities, came to Westminster Hall to make this request. Jeffreys burst into a storm of rage. "Not a minute," he cried, "to save his life. I can Ideal with saints as well as with sinners. There stands Oates on one side of the pillory; and, if Baxter stood on the other, the two greatest rogues in the kingdom would stand together."

When the trial came on`at Guildhall, a crowd of those who loved and honoured Baxter filled the court. At his side stood Doctor William Bates, one of the most eminent of the Nonconformist divines. Two Whig barristers of great note, Pollexfen and Wallop, appeared for the defendant. Pollexfen had scarce begun his address to the jury, when the Chief Justice broke forth, "Pollexfen, I know you well. I will set a mark on you. You are the patron of the faction. This is an old rogue, a schismatical knave, a hypocritical villain. He hates the Liturgy. He would have nothing but long-winded cant without book ;" and then his lordship turned up his eyes, clasped his hands, and began to sing through his nose, in imitation of what he supposed to be Baxter's style of praying, "Lord, we are thy people, thy peculiar people, thy dear people." Pollexfen gently reminded the court that his late majesty had thought Baxter deserving of a bishopric. "And what ailed the old blockhead then," cried Jeffreys, "that he did not take it?" His fury now rose almost to madness. He called Baxter a dog, and swore that it would be no more than justice to whip such a villain through the whole city.

'Wallop interposed, but fared no better than his leader.

"You are

in all these dirty causes, Mr. Wallop," said the judge. "Gentlemen of the long robe ought to be ashamed to assist such factious knaves." The advocate made another attempt to obtain a hearing, but to no purpose. "If you do not know your duty," said Jeffreys, "I will teach it you."

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Wallop sate down; and Baxter himself attempted to put in a word. But the Chief Justice drowned all expostulation in a torrent of ribaldry and invective, mingled with scraps of Hudibras. My lord," said the old man, "I have been much blamed by Dissenters in speaking respectfully of bishops." "Baxter for bishops!" cried the judge, "that's a merry conceit indeed. I know what you mean by bishops, rascals like yourself, Kidderminster bishops, factious snivelling Presbyterians!" Again Baxter essayed to speak, and again Jeffreys bellowed, "Richard, Richard, dost thou think we will let thee poison the court? Richard, thou art an old knave. Thou hast written books enough to load a cart, and every book as full of sedition as an egg is full of meat. By the grace of God I'll look after thee. I see a great many of your brotherhood waiting to know what will befal their mighty Don. And there," he continued, fixing his savage eye on Bates, "there is a doctor of the party at your elbow. But, by the grace of God Almighty, I will crush you all!"

'Baxter held his peace. But one of the junior counsel for the defence made a last effort, and undertook to show that the words of which complaint was made would not bear the construction put on them by the information. With this view he began to read the context. In a moment he was roared down. "You shan't turn the court into a con

venticle!" The noise of weeping was heard from some of those who surrounded Baxter. "Snivelling calves!" said the judge.

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• Witnesses to character were in attendance, and among them were several clergymen of the Established Church. But the Chief Justice would hear nothing. "Does your lordship think," said Baxter, "that any jury will convict a man on such a trial as this?" I warrant you, Mr. Baxter," said Jeffreys. "Don't trouble yourself about that." Jeffreys was right. The sheriffs were the tools of the government. The juries, selected by the sheriffs from among the fiercest zealots of the Tory party, conferred for a moment, and returned a verdict of guilty. My lord," said Baxter, as he left the court, "there was once a Chief Justice who would have treated me very differently." He alluded to his learned and virtuous friend Sir Matthew Hale. "There is not an honest man in England," answered Jeffreys, "but that looks on thee as a knave."—Ib. pp. 492-494.

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The treatment of Baxter clearly indicated the hostility of the government to the Protestant Nonconformists. Strange to say there have not been wanting men to represent James as the advocate of toleration. Never was a more baseless theory, nor one in more obvious contrast to all the facts of the case. When his exclusion from the English throne had been proposed on the ground of his religious faith, he had discoursed on the impolicy of persecution, and the inviolability of conscience. He could then parade himself as a proficient in the doctrines which Milton had taught a previous generation, and which Locke subsequently enshrined in his immortal treatises.

'But,' remarks Mr. Macaulay, his zeal for the rights of conscience ended with the predominance of the Whig party. When fortune changed, when he was no longer afraid that others would persecute him, when he had it in his power to persecute others, his real propensities began to show themselves. He hated the Puritan sects with a manifold hatred, theological and political, hereditary and personal. He regarded them as the foes of heaven, as the foes of all legitimate authority in Church and State, as his great grandmother's foes and his grandfather's, his father's and his mother's, his brother's and his own. He, who had complained so loudly of the laws against Papists, now declared himself unable to conceive how men could have the impudence to propose the repeal of the laws against the Puritans. He, whose favourite theme had been the injustice of requiring civil functionaries to take religious tests, established in Scotland, when he resided there as Viceroy, the most rigorous religious test that has ever been known in the empire. He, who had expressed just indignation when the priests of his own faith were hanged and quartered, amused himself with hearing Covenanters shriek and seeing them writhe while their knees were beaten flat in the boots. In this mood he became king, and he immediately demanded and obtained from the obsequious Estates of Scotland, as the surest pledge of their loyalty, the most sanguinary law that has ever in our islands been enacted against Protestant Nonconformists.'-Ib. pp. 497, 498.

The professions he afterwards made, were still more obviously deceptive. His Indulgences were the offspring of guile, specious in word, but rancorous in spirit, designed to pave the way for the restoration of Popery by promoting division amongst Protestant sects. But it is needless to occupy space in the refutation of a theory which no sane man now ventures to abet.

The first parliament of James was constituted apparently to his mind. He expressed unbounded satisfaction with it, and the choice of Sir John Trevor, a creature of Jeffreys, as Speaker, seemed to justify his complacency. The session opened on the 13th May, and the king, while professing his resolution to maintain the established government in Church and State, addressed an extraordinary admonition to the representatives of his people: He was apprehensive,' he said, 'that they might be inclined to dole out money to him, from time to time, in the hope that they should thus force him to call them frequently together. But he must warn them that he was not to be so dealt with, and that, if they wished him to meet them often, they must use him well.' This threatening was received with loud cheers by the Tory members, who were yet on the very verge of a deadly struggle with the monarch. Those who looked only on the surface, imagined that the throne was secure, but more thoughtful observers, who took into account the character of the English people, and the history of the past forty years, augured ill for a monarch who commenced his intercourse with Parliament by such undisguised and insolent tyranny. The event justified their anticipation, but the proceedings of Parliament were now interrupted by the invasion of Argyle and Monmouth, the former of whom landed in Scotland, and the latter in England. Both expeditions, it is needless to say, failed. The nation was not yet ripe for change, and Monmouth was wanting in all the qualities of a great leader. It would have been

madness to adopt the illegitimate son of Charles to the prejudice of the House of Orange, and we cannot, therefore, regret the defeat of the invaders, however much we pity the fate of some of them. The execution of Argyle is a beautiful episode in the history. The brightest part of his career commenced with his arrest. We see little of the man until this calamity befel him, but from that moment, the serene and magnanimous air of a true hero is visible. Having replied to the written interrogatories of the Privy Council, Mr. Macaulay informs us :—

'He was told that unless he returned fuller answers he should be put to the torture. James, who was doubtless sorry that he could not feast his own eyes with the sight of Argyle in the boots, sent down to Edinburgh positive orders that nothing should be omitted which could wring out of the traitor information against all who had been concerned