The Lord Chancellor’s impartiality and conscientious exactness is proverbial; and is, we believe, as inflexible as it is delicate in all cases that occur in the stated routine of legal practice.  The impatience, the irritation, the hopes, the fears, the confident tone of the applicants move him not a jot from his intended course, he looks at their claims with the “lack lustre eye” of prefessional indifference.  Power and influence apart, his next strongest passion is to indulge in the exercise of professional learning and skill, to amuse himself with the dry details and intricate windings of the law of equity.  He delights to balance a straw, to see a feather turn the scale, or make it even again; and divides and subdivides a scruple to the smallest fraction.  He unravels the web of argument and pieces it together again; folds it up and lays it aside, that he may examine it more at his leisure.  He hugs indecision to his breast, and takes home a modest doubt or a nice point to solace himself with it in protracted, luxurious dalliance.  Delay seems, in his mind, to be of the very essence of justice.  He no more hurries through a question than if no one was waiting for the result, and he was merely a dilettanti, fanciful judge, who played at my Lord Chancellor, and busied himself with quibbles and punctilios as an idle hobby and harmless illusion.  The phlegm of the Chancellor’s disposition gives one almost a surfeit of impartiality and candour:  we are sick of the eternal poise of childish dilatoriness; and would wish law and justice to be decided at once by a cast of the dice (as they were in Rabelais) rather than be kept in frivolous and tormenting suspense.  But there is a limit even to this extreme refinement and scrupulousness of the Chancellor.  The understanding acts only in the absence of the passions.  At the approach of the loadstone, the needle trembles, and points to it.  The air of a political question has a wonderful tendency to brace and quicken the learned Lord’s faculties.  The breath of a court speedily oversets a thousand objections, and scatters the cobwebs of his brain.  The secret wish of power is a thumping make-weight, where all is so nicely-balanced beforehand.  In the case of a celebrated beauty and heiress, and the brother of a Noble Lord, the Chancellor hesitated long, and went through the forms, as usual:  but who ever doubted, where all this indecision would end?  No man in his senses, for a single instant!  We shall not press this point, which is rather a ticklish one.  Some persons thought that from entertaining a fellow-feeling on the subject, the Chancellor would have been ready to favour the Poet-Laureat’s application to the Court of Chancery for an injunction against Wat Tyler.  His Lordship’s sentiments on such points are not so variable, he has too much at stake.  He recollected the year 1794, though Mr. Southey had forgotten it!—­