atience and temper along with them. At last he
addressed this laconic application to his patron: 'The Chief Justiceship
of Chester is vacant; am I to have it?' and received the following
laconic answer--'No! by God! Kenyon shall have it.'

"Having once got into a dispute with a bishop respecting a living, of
which the Great Seal had the alternate presentation, the bishop's
secretary called upon him, and said, 'My lord of ---- sends his
compliments to your lordship, and believes that the next turn to present
to ---- belongs to his lordship.' _Chancellor._--'Give my compliments to
his lordship, and tell him that I will see him d----d first before he
shall present.' _Secretary._--'This, my lord, is a very unpleasant
message to deliver to a bishop.' 'You are right, it is so, therefore
tell the bishop that _I_ will be damned first before he shall
present.'"[Q]

Lord Campbell concludes his records of the Chancellor's _jusjuration_
(if we may coin a word for a precedent so extraordinary), by frankly
extracting into his pages the whole of a long damnatory ode, which was
put into the judge's mouth by the authors of the once-famous collection
of libels called _Criticisms on the Rolliad_, and _Probationary Odes for
the Laureateship_,--the precursor, and very witty precursor, though
flagrantly coarse and personal, of the _Anti-Jacobin Magazine_ and the
_Rejected Addresses_. They were on the Whig side of politics, and are
understood to have been the production of Dr. Lawrence, a civilian, and
George Ellis, the author of several elegant works connected with poetry
and romance. We shall notice the book further when we come to speak of
Mr. Ellis himself. Lord Thurlow is made to contribute one of the
Probationary Odes; and he does it in so abundant and complete a style,
that bold as our "innocence" makes us in this particular, yet not having
the legal warrant of the biographer, we really have not the courage to
bring it in as evidence. The reader, however, may guess of what sort of
stuff it is composed, when he hears that it begins with the
comprehensive line,

"Damnation seize ye all;"

and ends with the following pleasing and particular couplet:--

"Damn them beyond what mortal tongue can tell;
Confound, sink, plunge them all, to deepest, blackest hell."

After this, it will hardly be a climax to add, that Peter Pindar said of
this Keeper of the King's Conscience, with great felicity, that he
"swore his prayers."