strongest of the twelve, and before I find such a petition as this a libel, here I will stay till I am no bigger than a tobacco-pipe." It was six in the morning before Arnold yielded. It was soon known that the jury were agreed, but what the verdict would be was still a secret.

At ten the court again met. The crowd was greater than ever. The jury appeared in their box, and there was a breathless stillness.

Sir Samuel Astry spoke, "Do you find the defendants, or any of them, guilty of the misdemeanour whereof they are impeached, or not guilty?" Sir Roger Langley answered, "Not guilty."

As the words passed his lips, Halifax sprung up and waved his hat. At that signal, benches and galleries raised a shout. In a moment ten thousand persons, who crowded the great hall, replied with a still louder shout, which made the old oaken roof crack; and in another moment the innumerable throng without set up a third huzza, which was heard at Temple Bar. The boats which covered the Thames gave an answering cheer. A peal of gunpowder was heard on the water, and another, and another; and so, in a few moments, the glad tidings went flying past the Savoy and the Friars to London Bridge, and to the forest of masts below.

As the news spread, streets and squares, market-places, and coffee-houses, broke forth into acclamations. Yet were the acclamations less strange than the weeping. For the feelings of men had been wound up to such a point that at length the stern English nature, so little used to outward signs of emotion, gave way, and thousands sobbed for very joy. Meanwhile, from the outskirts of the multitude, horsemen were spurring off to bear along the great roads intelligence of the victory of our church and nation. Yet not even that astounding explosion could awe the bitter and intrepid spirit of the solicitor. Striving to make himself heard above the din, he called on the judges to commit those who had violated, by clamour, the dignity of a court of justice. One of the rejoicing populace was seized; but the tribunal felt it would be absurd to punish a single individual for an offence common to hundreds of thousands, and dismissed him with a gentle reprimand.

The acquitted prelates took refuge from the crowd which implored their blessing in the nearest chapel where divine service was performing. Many churches were open on that morning throughout the capital, and many pious persons repaired thither. The bells of all the parishes of the city and liberties were ringing. The jury, meanwhile, could scarcely make their way out of the hall. They were forced to shake hands with hundreds.

"God bless you," cried the people; "God prosper your families; you have done like honest, good-natured gentlemen. You have saved us to-day." As the gentlemen who had supported the cause drove off, they flung from their windows handfuls of money, and bade the crowd drink to the health of the bishops and the jury. The attorney went with the tidings to Sunderland, who happened to be conversing with the Nuncio. "Never," said Powis, "within man's memory, have there been such shouts and such tears of joy as to-day." The king had that morning visited the camp on Hounslow Heath. Sunderland instantly sent a courier thither with the news. James was in Lord Feversham's tent when the express arrived. He was greatly disturbed, and exclaimed in French, "So much the worse for them." He soon set out for London.

While he was present, respect prevented the soldiers from giving loose to their feelings; but he had scarcely quitted the camp when he heard a great shouting behind him. Ile was surprised, and asked what the uproar meant. "Nothing," was the answer. "The soldiers are glad that the bishops are. acquitted." "Do you call that nothing?" said James, and then repeated, "So much the worse for them." He might well be out of temper. His defeat had been complete and most humiliating. Had the prelates escaped on account of some technical defect in the case for the crown, had they escaped because they had not written the petition in Middlesex, or because it was impossible to prove, according to the strict rules of law, that they had delivered to the king the paper for which they were called in question, the prerogative would have suffered no shock. Happily for the country, the fact of publication had been fully established. The counsel for the defence had therefore been forced to attack the dispensing power. They had attacked it with great learning, eloquence, and boldness. The advocates of the Government had been, by universal acknowledgment, overmatched in the contest. Not a single judge had ventured to declare that the Declaration of Indulgence was legal. One judge had in the strongest terms pronounced it illegal. The language of the whole town was that the dispensing power had received a fatal blow.-MACAULAY.

1. Explain the difference between the phrases consider of their verdict" and "consider their verdict."

2. Nuncio, i.e. Messenger or ambassador.

3. It is the principle of the English law that the twelve Jurymen must be unanimous before a verdict can be returned. In Scotland there are fifteen in the Jury, and a simple majority decides.

ACQUITTAL OF THE BISHOPS.

A VOICE, from long-expectant thousands sent,
Shatters the air, and troubles tower and spire:
For Justice hath absolved the innocent,
And Tyranny is balked of her desire:
Up, down, the busy Thames-rapid as fire
Coursing a train of gunpowder-it went,
And transport finds in every street a vent,
Till the whole city rings like one vast quire.
The Fathers urge the people to be still,

With outstretched hands and earnest speech-in vain,
Yea, many, haply wont to entertain

Small reverence for the mitre's office,
And to religion's self no friendly will,
A prelate's blessing ask on bended knees.

WORDSWORTH.

Conspicuous.
Interposed.
Inaudible.
Imagination.

A TRULY great man, the best and greatest public character that I had ever the opportunity of making myself acquainted with, on assuming the command of a man-of-war, found a mutinous crew, more than one-half of them uneducated Irishmen, and of the remainder no small portion had become sailors by compromise of punishment. What terror could effect, by severity and frequency of acts of discipline, had been already effected. And what was this effect? Something like that of a polar winter on a flask of brandy, the furious spirit concentrated itself with tenfold strength at the heart; open violence was changed into secret plots and conspiracies, and the consequent orderliness of the crew, as far as they were orderly, was but the brooding of a tempest.

The new commander instantly commenced a system of discipline as near as possible to that of ordinary law; as much as possible he avoided, in his own person, the appearance of any will or arbitrary power to vary, or to remit, punishment. The rules to be observed were affixed to a conspicuous part of the ship, with the particular penalties for the breach of each particular rule; and care was taken that every individual of the ship should know and understand this code. With a single exception in the case of mutinous behaviour, a space of twenty-four hours was

appointed between the first charge and the second hearing of the cause, at which time the accused person was permitted and required to bring forward whatever he thought conducive to his defence or palliation.

If, as was commonly the case-for the officers well knew that the commander would seriously resent in them all caprice of will, and by no means permit to others what he denied to himself,- -no answer could be returned to the three questions: Did you not commit the act? did you not know that it was in contempt of such a rule, and in defiance of such a punishment? and was it not wholly in your own power to have obeyed the one and avoided the other?-the sentence was then passed with the greatest solemnity, and another, but shorter, space of time was again interposed between it and its actual execution. During this space the feelings of the commander, as a man, were well blended with his inflexibility as the organ of the law; and how much he suffered previously to and during the execution of the sentence was so well known to the crew, that it became a common saying with them, when a sailor was about to be punished, the captain takes it more to heart than the fellow himself."

But whenever the commander perceived any trait of pride in the offender, or the germs of any noble feeling, he lost no opportunity of saying, "It is not the pain that you are about to suffer which grieves me! You are none of you, I trust, such cowards as to turn faint-hearted at the thought of that; but that, being a man, and one who is to fight for his king and country, you should have made it necessary to treat you as a vicious beast-it is this that grieves me."

I have been assured, both by a gentleman who was a lieutenant on board that ship at the time when the heroism of its captain, aided by his characteristic calmness and foresight, greatly influenced the decision of the most glorious battle recorded in the annals of our naval history-and very recently by a gray-headed sailor, who did not even know my name, or could have suspected that I was previously acquainted with the circumstances-I have been assured, I say, that the success of his plan was such as astonished the oldest officers, and convinced the most incredulous. Ruffians who, like the old buccaneers,' had been used to inflict torture on themselves for sport, or in order to harden themselves beforehand, were tamed and overpowered, how or why they themselves knew not.

From the fiercest spirits were heard the most earnest entreatics for the forgiveness of their commander; not before the punishment, for it was too well known that then they would have been to no purpose, but days after it, when the bodily pain

was remembered but as a dream. An invincible power it was that quelled them, a power which was, therefore, irresistible, because it took away the very will of resisting. It was the awful power of law, acting on natures preconfigured to its influences. A faculty was appealed to in the offender's own being; a faculty and a presence of which he had not been previously made aware, but it answered to the appeal. Its real existence, therefore, could not be doubted, nor its reply rendered inaudible; and the very struggle of the wilder passions to keep uppermost counteracted their own purpose, by wasting in internal contest that energy which before had acted in its entireness on external resistance or provocation. Strength may be met with strength; the power of inflicting pain may be baffled by the pride of endurance; the eye of rage may be answered by the stare of defiance, or the downcast look of dark and revengeful resolve; and with all this there is an outward and determined object to which the mind can attach its passions and purposes, and bury its own disquietudes in the full occupation of the senses.

But who dares struggle with an invisible combatant, with an enemy which exists and makes us know its existence-but where it is, we ask in vain? No space contains it, time promises no control over it; it has no ear for my threats, it has no substance that my hands can grasp, or my weapons find vulnerable; it commands and cannot be commanded, it acts and is insusceptible of my reaction; the more I strive to subdue it, the more am I compelled to think of it, and the more I think of it, the more do I find it to possess a reality out of my myself, and not to be a phantom of my own imagination; that all, but the most abandoned men, acknowledge its authority, and that the whole strength and majesty of my country are pledged to support it, and yet that for me its power is the same with that of my own permanent self, and that all the choice, which is permitted to me, consists in having it for my guardian angel or my avenging fiend! This is the spirit of law the lute of Amphion !2 the harp of Orpheus! This is the new necessity which compels man into social state, now and always, by a still-beginning, neverceasing, force of moral cohesion.-COLERIDGE's 'Friend.'

2. Amphion was so skilled in music that it was said he was able to move stones by it.

1. Buccaneer was a term originally | West Indies and South America during applied to one who, like the Indians, dries the 17th and 18th centuries. and smokes fish. The name was first given to the French settlers in Hayti, whose business was to hunt wild cattle and swine. It was afterwards applied to the piratical adventurers, English and French, who infested the coasts of the

3. Orpheus was a still more celebrated musician of Greece, whose harp was able to produce all kinds of wonders.