of its cases.  Jeffreys served his apprenticeship for the service that our two last Stuarts had in reserve for him so well, that he soon became, so his beggared biographer describes him, the most consummate bully that ever disgraced an English bench.  The boldest impudence when he was a young advocate, and the most brutal ferocity when he was an old judge, sat equally secure on the brazen forehead of George Jeffreys.  The real and undoubted ability and scholarship of Jeffreys only made his wickedness the more awful, and his whole career the greater curse both to those whose tool he was, and to those whose blood he drank daily.  Jeffreys drank brandy and sang lewd songs all night, and he drank blood and cursed and swore on the bench all day.  Just imagine the state of our English courts when a judge could thus assail a poor wretch of a woman after passing a cruel sentence upon her.  ‘Hangman,’ shouted the ermined brute, ’Hangman, pay particular attention to this lady.  Scourge her soundly, man.  Scourge her till the blood runs.  It is the Christmas season; a cold season for madam to strip in.  See, therefore, man, that you warm her shoulders thoroughly.’  And you all know who Richard Baxter was.  You have all read his seraphic book, The Saints’ Rest.  Well, besides being the Richard Baxter so well known to our saintly fathers and mothers, he was also, and he was emphatically, the peace-maker of the Puritan party.  Baxter’s political principles were of the most temperate and conciliatory, and indeed, almost royalist kind.  He was a man of strong passions, indeed, but all the strength and heat of his passions ran out into his hatred of sin and his love of holiness, and an unsparing and consuming care for the souls of his people.  Very Faithful himself stood before the bar of Judge Jeffreys in the person of Richard Baxter.  It took all the barefaced falsehood and scandalous injustice of the crown prosecutors to draw out the sham indictment that was read out in court against inoffensive Richard Baxter.  But what was lacking in the charge of the crown was soon made up by the abominable scurrility of the judge.  ‘You are a schismatical knave,’ roared out Jeffreys, as soon as Baxter was brought into court.  ‘You are an old hypocritical villain.’  And then, clasping his hands and turning up his eyes, he sang through his nose:  ’O Lord, we are Thy peculiar people:  we are Thy dear and only people.’  ‘You old blockhead,’ he again roared out, ’I will have you whipped through the city at the tail of the cart.  By the grace of God I will look after you, Richard.’  And the tiger would have been as good as his word had not an overpowering sense of shame compelled the other judges to protest and get Baxter’s inhuman sentence commuted to fine and imprisonment.  And so on, and so on.  But it was Jeffreys’ ’Western Circuit,’ as it was called, that filled up the cup of his infamy—­an infamy, say the historians, that will last as long as the language