o come and officiate with any part of the evening
service before supper: but he himself got behind the table in his hall,
and read a chapter, and then a long-winded prayer, after the
Presbyterian way." Very displeased were the Chief Justice and the other
Judge of Assize; and their dissatisfaction was not diminished on the
following day when on entering Exeter a rumor met them, that "the judges
had been at a conventicle, and the grand jury intended to present them
and all their retinue for it."

Not many years elapsed before this Darling of the West was replaced, by
another Chief Justice who asserted the power of constituted authorities
with an energy that roused more fear than gratitude in the breasts of
local magistrates. That grim, ghastly, hideous progress, which Jeffreys
made in the plenitude of civil and military power through the Western
Counties, was not without its comic interludes; and of its less
repulsive scenes none was more laughable than that which occurred in
Bristol Courthouse when the terrible Chief Justice upbraided the Bristol
magistrates for taking part in a slave-trade of the most odious sort.
The mode in which the authorities of the western port carried on their
iniquitous traffic deserves commemoration, for no student can understand
the history of any period until he has acquainted himself with its
prevailing morality. At a time when by the wealth of her merchants and
the political influence of her inhabitants Bristol was the second city
of England, her mayor and aldermen used daily to sit in judgment on
young men and growing boys, who were brought before them and charged
with trivial offences. Some of the prisoners had actually broken the
law: but in a large proportion of the cases the accusations were totally
fictitious--the arrests having been made in accordance with the
directions of the magistrates, on charges which the magistrates
themselves knew to be utterly without foundation. Every morning the
Bristol tolsey or court-house saw a crowd of those wretched
captives--clerks out of employment, unruly apprentices, street boys
without parents, and occasionally children of honest birth, ay, of
patrician lineage, whose prompt removal from their native land was
desired by brutal fathers or vindictive guardians; and every morning a
mockery of judicial investigation was perpetrated in the name of
justice. Standing in a crowd the prisoners were informed of the offences
charged against them; huddled to