RIGMAROLE. A CERTAIN eminent leading counsel was celebrated at the bar for the following mode of examining a witness: "Now, pray, listen to the question I am going to ask you. Be attentive; remember, you will answer as you please; and, remember, I don't care a rush what you answer," &c. Lord Brougham, somewhat weary of these persecutions, resolved to mortify the utterer of them; and one day meeting him in the street, thus accosted him-"Ha! is it you, C- ? Now pray listen to the question I am going to ask you. Be attentive; remember, you will answer what you please; and, remember, I don't care a rush what you answer. How are you?" THE FOUNDLING HOSPITAL. LORD TENTERDEN, before the labour of his judicial functions engrossed the whole of his time, took an active part in the administration of the affairs of the Foundling Hospital, and wrote the following verses, to be set to music, and sung at the commemorative festival of the Governors : The ship sail'd smoothly o'er the sea, Not in the schools by sages taught To woo fair virtue's form; But nurs'd on danger's flinty lap, When threat'ning tempests round him raged, And swelling billows heav'd, His bark a wretched orphan seem'd, Of aid and hope bereav'd. PRESSING TO DEATH. If through the clouds a golden gleam Around the glowing land he spread Warm pity's magic spell; And tender bosoms learn'd from him Beauty and wealth, and wit and power, And angels smil'd upon the work Virtue and meekness mark'd his face And Hogarth's colours yet display Our ground his ashes sanctify, Our songs his praise employs; 79 Lord Tenterden lies buried in the chapel of the Foundling Hospital; in the course of the inscription written on his Lordship, he is stated to have been "born in very humble station, of a father who was prudent, and a mother who was pious." After enumerating the offices he filled, the memorialist adds, "Learn, reader, how much in this country may, under the blessing of God, be attained by honest industry." PRESSING TO DEATH. THIS barbarous punishment was inflicted so lately as the year 1735, when, at the Sussex assizes, a man who pretended to be dumb and lame, was indicted for murder and robbery. He had been taken up on suspicion; several spots of blood, and part of the stolen property, *Brownlow's Memoranda of the Foundling Hospital. being found upon him. When he was put to the bar, he would not speak or plead, though often urged to it. The sentence to be inflicted upon such as stand mute was read to him in vain. Four or five persons in court swore that they had heard him speak, and the boy who was his accomplice, and was apprehended, was there as a witness against him; yet he continued mute. He was accordingly carried back to Horsham Gaol, to be pressed to death, if he would not plead. The punishment was thus inflicted :—first was lain upon him one hundred weight, then one hundred more, and still he continued obstinate; another hundred was added, and yet he would not speak; then 50ibs. more, when he appeared in the agonies of death; and the executioner, who weighed between sixteen and seventeen stone, laid himself upon the board whereon the weights were placed, and killed the poor creature instantly. FALL OF SIR THOMAS MORE. WHAT an idea of the dismantling of our nature is conveyed in these few words, which Roper, Sir Thomas More's son-in-law, relates of him. He had seen Henry VIII. walking round the Chancellor's garden at Chelsea, with his arm round More's neck, and could not help congratulating him on being the object of so much kindness. "I thank our lord," said More; “I find his grace my very good lord, indeed; and I believe he doth as singularly favour me as any subject in this realm. However, son Roper, I may tell thee I have no cause to be proud thereof; for if my head THE FAMILY SUIT. 81 would win a castle in France, it would not fail to be struck off." And so it proved. This great man was beheaded in 1535, for refusing to take the oath which acknowledged the king's supremacy. After the attainder of Sir Thomas, Henry VIII. seized upon all his possessions, without any regard to his widow and family, whom he left so poor, that his great grandson says they had not money wherewith to buy More a winding-sheet! THE FAMILY SUIT. THE son-in-law of a Chancery barrister having succeeded to the lucrative practice of the latter, came one morning in breathless ecstacy to inform him, that he had succeeded in bringing nearly to its termination a cause which had been pending in the court of scruples for several years. Instead of obtaining the expected congratulations of the retired veteran of the law, his intelligence was received with indignation. "It was by this suit," exclaimed he, "that my father was enabled to provide for me, and to portion your wife; and, with the exercise of common prudence, it would have furnished you with the means of providing handsomely for your children and grandchildren." LAW REFORM. MANY years since, when the reform of the law was first agitated, the following anecdotic and eloquent remarks appeared in the Edinburgh Review : "Thanks unto our ancestors, there is now no Star F Chamber before whom may be summoned either the scholar, whose learning offends the bishops, by disproving incidentally the divine nature of tithes or the counsellor, who gives his client an opinion against some assumed prerogative. There is no High Commission Court to throw into a jail, until his dying day, at the instigation of a Bancroft, the bencher, who shall move for the discharge of an English subject from imprisonment contrary to law. It is no longer the duty of a Privy Councillor to seize the suspected volume of an antiquary, or plunder the pen of an ex-chief justice whilst lying on his death-bed. Government licencers of the press are gone, whose infamous perversion of the writings of other lawyers will cause no future Hale to leave behind him orders, expressly prohibiting the posthumous publication of his legal MSS., lest the sanctity of his name should be abused, to the destruction of those laws of which he had been long the venerable and living image. An advocate of the present day need not absolutely withdraw (as Sir Thomas More is reported to have done prudently for a time,) from his profession, because the Crown had taken umbrage at his discharge of a public duty. "It is, however, flattery and self-delusion to imagine that the lust of power, and the weaknesses of human nature, have been put down by the Bill of Rights; and that our forefathers have left nothing to be done by their descendants. The violence of former times is, indeed, no longer practicable; but the spirit which led to these excesses can never die : it changes its aspects and its instruments with circumstances, and takes the |