relish these volumes of biography. Still Johnson, single-handed, will ever attract more of the attention of posterity than any one of the Chancellors, or probably than all of them put together; yet he, even in his heyday of fame, could not help for a moment wishing that he had been a "law Lord." Had he been one, he would have been distinguished indeed, if we only form a judgment from the cases he drew up for Mr. Boswell --and we may say, with great degree of certainty, that he would have attained that eminence which would have placed him in the fortunate category of having had Campbell as his biographer. From the period of this pattern of all judicial excellence, entire freedom from corruption and bribery has been continued. Lord Campbell says, "Spotless purity-not only an absence from bribery and corruption, but freedom from undue influence, and an earnest desire to do justice-may at that time, and ever afterwards, be considered as belonging to all English judges." This was not the case before. Old Hugh Latimer, the ever honest and fearless Bishop, mercilessly attacked the proud and venal judges of his time.* He could not abide their velvet coats and upskips, but besought the Lord Protector himself to hear causes. "View your judges," he says in his * During the same reign (Edward the Sixth), that celebrated clergyman, Bernard Gilpin, preaches against the same corruptions, in the same plain and uncomprising manner as Hugh Latimer, as we learn from his notable sermon preached before the king, on the first Sunday after the Epiphany, 1552, from the text of Luke ii. 41-50. It required true moral courage in both of them to preach, as they so firmly did, against the overwhelming corruption and carelessness that prevailed among all classes of nobility, of judges, magistrates, and ministers, in those times; and the anecdote of the Bishop of Worcester, in regard to his befriending the cause of the poor man, must be well known. second Sermon, "and hear poor men's causes. And you, proud judges, hearken what God saith in his holy book. 'Hear the poor,' saith he, as well as the rich.' Mark that saying, thou proud judge! Hell will be full of such judges, if they repent not and amend." In his third Sermon, he tells the story of Cambyses, who avenged a poor widow by ordering the judge to be flayed, and his skin to be laid on the chair of judgment, that all judges afterwards should sit on the same skin. Surely it was a goodly sign," says Latimer, "the sign of the judge's skin. I pray God we may once see the sign of the skin in England." In his fifth Sermon, he again lashes them. "If a judge," he says, "should ask me the way to hell, I would show him this way-first by covetousness, then bribes, then perverting of judgment: but there lacks a fourth thing," he continues, "to make up the mess, which, so God help me, if I were judge, should be a Tyburn tippet. Were it the judge of the King's Bench, my Lord Chief Justice of England, yea, were it my Lord Chancellor himself, to Tyburn with him." Happily, in no modern instance have Latimer's coarse words been needed-both Hardwicke and Thurlow were honest as the day as regards such charges; but, methinks, more than to these, Johnson's own lines would have applied to himself, had he ever become a retiring chancellor, "Calm conscience then his former life survey'd, CHAPTER XIV. OPINIONS ON DISSENT AND DISSENTERS. DR. JOHNSON, it must be remembered, lived during a period when dissent, in great degree, was rather a commencing, than an established institution: perhaps it is more correct to say, that it was a revival of an old error: great lethargy had crept into the dissent that already existed, as well as into the sanctuaries of the Church; and religion generally, as with the Mediæval Church, was to all appearance in a state of suspended animation. There was need, then, that a spirit should go forth, and lift up a great cry, aye, better to utter very screams over the seeming corpse, than to leave it alone to the gaze of an exulting and scoffing nation. Hence, perhaps more within than without the Church, a loud shout of awakening from slumber arose-the Venns, Romaines, Topladys, Berridges, Walkers, Herveys, Madans, Newtons, &c. breathed the breath of life into the dry bones on one side of doctrinal excitement, with the external help of Whitfield, Doddridge, Ingham, Harris, Cennick, Rowland Hill, &c. all Calvinists to the backbone, whom Lady Huntingdon so largely favoured, and Horace Walpole elegantly caricatured; while, still in the Church, Wesley, Fletcher of Madeley, and their followers took the field, and with more zeal than judgment, preached to the multitudes of the nation with extreme energy what they conceived to be the vital doctrines of the blessed Gospel: and from the exertions of all these, Churchmen and dissenters arose, stood upon their feet, an exceeding great and imposing army. : Still, this was a convulsive coming to life of the corpse-it was a galvanic resuscitation-inwardly with all the agony of returning sensation to a drowned man, and outwardly with all the grimace and tortuous writhing which would attend on the reviving work within. No wonder, then, that much occurred which would tend to horrify and scare sober and pious Christians for many would say, Let us retire awhile and not gaze upon these dreadful contortions of the countenance, and these awful strugglings of the body with its returning inner life-let us wait until health be restored, the face calm and rational, the body sound and standing erect in perfect strength; for, while a process is required of which we stand in no need, let the proper physicians and attendants gather round, but let not us, who can do no good, go and indulge a morbid curiosity, and which ultimately might, in the common sympathy of our uncertain nature, effect harm within our own minds and souls, by seducing us from soberness and settledness into eccentricity and discontentedness. For in these days, it must be borne in mind, there were very many real Christian hearts beating in the Church with all the faith, hope, and charity, of which Christian men are capable: and to these, the new doings, and the new processes of alarm ing and arousing the dead and slumbering ones, seemed to partake of much of the hideous and the horrible. It was what Mrs. Radcliffe and her crew were to the common world of readers, not only alluring them from the perusal of wholesome and rational literature, but rendering them fearful of their own selves and of all other people afraid to walk out by day, or sit in the house by night; and when the dread hour of midnight arrived, and the clock struck one, oh what fearfulness and trembling, what apparitions, hollow groans, and shrieks of subterraneous victims, at once agonising and appalling! and rendering the poor creatures incapable of the exercise of the truly heroic and milder virtues of fortitude, resignation and discretion. Now Dr. Johnson was one of the soberly religious minds of the age. He looked upon the Church as a loyal establishment, guiding the solid and prudential convictions of mankind for the present existence, and assuredly teaching that line of doctrine, and exhorting to that kind of disposition, which must certainly be adapted for the heavenly and eternal life. He could not abide the carnal excitements and eccentricities of men-and instead of standing in a street, or on a common, to list to the fire and eloquence of a Whitfield, he would have said with David, in his own resolute and self-humbling way,-"But as for me, I will come into Thine house, even upon the multitude of Thy mercy and in Thy fear will I worship toward Thy holy temple." But while all this amazing and confounding work was going on in English districts, Dr. Johnson had |