purposes, moot-points, pleas, demurrers, flaws in the indictment, double meanings, cases, inconsequentialities, these were the play-things, the darlings of Mr. Tooke’s mind; and with these he baffled the Judge, dumb-founded the Counsel, and outwitted the Jury.  The report of his trial before Lord Kenyon is a master-piece of acuteness, dexterity, modest assurance, and legal effect.  It is much like his examination before the Commissioners of the Income-Tax—­nothing could be got out of him in either case!  Mr. Tooke, as a political leader, belonged to the class of trimmers; or at most, it was his delight to make mischief and spoil sport.  He would rather be against himself than for any body else.  He was neither a bold nor a safe leader.  He enticed others into scrapes, and kept out of them himself.  Provided he could say a clever or a spiteful thing, he did not care whether it served or injured the cause.  Spleen or the exercise of intellectual power was the motive of his patriotism, rather than principle.  He would talk treason with a saving clause; and instil sedition into the public mind, through the medium of a third (who was to be the responsible) party.  He made Sir Francis Burdett his spokesman in the House and to the country, often venting his chagrin or singularity of sentiment at the expense of his friend; but what in the first was trick or reckless vanity, was in the last plain downright English honesty and singleness of heart.  In the case of the State Trials, in 1794, Mr. Tooke rather compromised his friends to screen himself.  He kept repeating that “others might have gone on to Windsor, but he had stopped at Hounslow,” as if to go farther might have been dangerous and unwarrantable.  It was not the question how far he or others had actually gone, but how far they had a right to go, according to the law.  His conduct was not the limit of the law, nor did treasonable excess begin where prudence or principle taught him to stop short, though this was the oblique inference liable to be drawn from his line of defence.  Mr. Tooke was uneasy and apprehensive for the issue of the Government-prosecution while in confinement, and said, in speaking of it to a friend, with a morbid feeling and an emphasis quite unusual with him—­“They want our blood—­blood—­blood!” It was somewhat ridiculous to implicate Mr. Tooke in a charge of High Treason (and indeed the whole charge was built on the mistaken purport of an intercepted letter relating to an engagement for a private dinnerparty)—­his politics were not at all revolutionary.  In this respect he was a mere pettifogger, full of chicane, and captious objections, and unmeaning discontent; but he had none of the grand whirling movements of the French Revolution, nor of the tumultuous glow of rebellion in his head or in his heart.  His politics were cast in a different mould, or confined to the party distinctions and court-intrigues and pittances of popular right, that made a noise in the