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ON A LATE EXTRAORDINARY CHARGE.

Lord Ellenborough has long been distinguished above the other luminaries of the law, by the decision of his manner and the vehemence of his language. Forgetting that to guide rather than direct to counsel rather than to persuade or intimidate, are the first duties of his exalted situation, he too frequently displays the warmth of the pleader, and indulges in asperities more becoming the interested party than the judge. To the ambition of being admired as an oracle, he unites a rooted and ardent attachment to a particular order of opinions, on which he descants with all the violence of the parliamentary or?- tor, and all the decision of a privileged arbiter of the lives and properties of the community, while juries forget their duty in admiring the fervor of his eloquence, and guide their sentence by a timid subservience to his dictates.

It is not our intention to ascribe the peculiarities of his lordship's judicial deportment to any principle or feeling inconsistent with the purest motives of justice or of duty. The sentiments that he warmly feels, he warmly expresses; and his long retention of a dignity which elevates him above the animadversion or opposition of his professional friends or rivals, has had a powerful but gradual tendency to flatter into expansion his latent feelings of conscious superiority, his proneness to dictation, and his impatience of dispute or contradiction. His errors as a judge, are to be ascribed to his peculiarities of temper, increased and exasperated by indulgence, and not to the destitution of amiable feelings, or just and honorable principles. As a political character, indeed, his retention of a place in the cabinet, notwithstanding the repeated expression of popular indignation, excited in the bosoms of his friends some unpleasant suspicions of his wisdom and his honesty; and the late

YOL. V. F