h emulous violence: for the Whigs considered him as their most
barbarous enemy; and the Tories found it convenient to throw on him the
blame of all the crimes which had sullied their triumph. A diligent and
candid enquiry will show that some frightful stories which have been
told concerning him are false or exaggerated. Yet the dispassionate
historian will be able to make very little deduction from the vast mass
of infamy with which the memory of the wicked judge has been loaded.

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 crossexamine
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 consummate bully ever known in his
profession. Tenderness for others and respect for himself were feelings
alike unknown to him. 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 fishmarket or the beargarden.
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 his eye were 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 o