to the notice of the House, he moved that their Lordships should be summoned to receive the communication.  The appointed day arrived, and the attendance of peers was unusually large.  Lord Mansfield rose amidst profound and anxious silence.  Lord Chatham and Lord Camden had calumniated the judges, and they were now no doubt to be the objects of a vote of censure.  Nothing of the kind.  Lord Mansfield simply informed the House that he had left a paper with the clerk assistant containing the judgment of the Court of King’s Bench in the case of “the King against Woodfall,” and then, to the astonishment of every one, resumed his seat.  Lord Camden rose and inquired whether the noble lord intended hereafter to found any motion on his paper?  Lord Mansfield answered “No,” and the House proceeded to other business.  The very next day Lord Camden resumed the subject.  He regarded the conduct of the Chief Justice as a challenge against himself, and he at once accepted it.  In direct contradiction to Lord Mansfield he maintained that his doctrine was not the law of England.  He had considered the noble lord’s “paper,” and had not found it very intelligible.  He begged to propose four questions to the noble and learned lord, to which he required categorical answers, that their lordships might know precisely the points they had to discuss.  The questions were submitted, and Lord Mansfield, instead of meeting them, “with most abject soothings,” as Horace Walpole gleefully says, “paid the highest compliments to Lord Camden.”  He had the highest esteem for the noble and learned lord who thus attacked him, and had ever courted his esteem in return.  He had not expected this treatment from his candor.  It was unfair; he would not answer interrogatories.  The reply was a signal for relentless torment.  Not a peer interposed on his behalf.  Distressed by his misery, Lord Mansfield sat down, remained still, and in sheer pity for their prey the dogs were called off.

In 1778 Lord Chatham died, and from the departure of the great commoner until his own decease Lord Mansfield occupied a more conspicuous place as a judge than as a politician in the public eye.  He continued to display upon the bench, as heretofore, the keenest perception, a resolute obedience to the dictates of justice, high incorruptibility, great learning, and thorough self-devotion to his beloved and chosen occupation.  He has been largely accused of favoring, in his early manhood, the designs of the Pretender, yet, from the beginning to the close of his public life, his fidelity to the reigning family could not be called in question.  He has been charged with gratifying prerogative at the expense of law, yet the liberty of the law was never more perfect, the rights of the subject were never more secure, than during his long tenure of the judicial office.  He has been stigmatized by Junius as an oppressor of men’s consciences, yet no man of his time regulated his conduct with a stricter regard to the humanizing principle of religious