ss, George Jeffreys!--thy
hands deep purple with the blood of thy murdered fellow men!
Ah, I know thee! awful and accursed shade! Two hundred years
after thy death, men hate thee still, not without cause! Let
me look upon thee! I know thy history. Pause and be still,
while I tell it to these men.

"Brothers, George Jeffreys 'began in the sedition line.'
'There was no act, however bad, that he would not resort to
to get on.' 'He was of a bold aspect, and cared not for the
countenance of any man.' 'He became the avowed, unblushing
slave of the court, and the bitter persecutor and
unappeasable enemy of the principles he had before
supported.' 'He was universally insolent and overbearing.'
'As a judge, he did not consider the decencies of his post,
nor did he so much as affect to be impartial, as became a
judge.' His face and voice were always unamiable. 'All
tenderness for the feelings of others, all self-respect were
obliterated from his mind.' He had 'a delight in misery,
merely as misery,' and 'that temper which tyrants require in
their worst instruments.' 'He made haste to sell his
forehead of brass and his tongue of venom to the court.' He
had 'more impudence than ten carted street-walkers;' and was
appropriately set to a work 'which could be trusted to no
man who reverenced law, or who was sensible of shame.' He
was a 'Commissioner' in 1685. You know of the 'Bloody
assizes' which he held, and how he sent to execution three
hundred and twenty persons in a single circuit. 'The whole
country was strewed with the heads and limbs of his
victims.' Yet a man wrote that 'A little more hemp might
have been usefully employed.' He was the worst of the
English judges. 'There was no measure, however illegal, to
the execution of which he did not devotedly and recklessly
abandon himself.' 'During the Stuart reigns, England was
cursed by a succession of ruffians in ermine, who, for the
sake of court favor, wrested the principles of law, the
precepts of religion, and the duties of humanity; but they
were all greatly outstripped by Jeffreys.' Such is his
history.

"Come, shade of a judicial butcher! Two hundred years thy
name has been pilloried in face of the world, and thy memory
gibbeted before mankind. Let us see how thou wilt com