The Parliament was certainly far from faultless.  We fully agree with Mr. Hallam in reprobating their treatment of Laud.  For the individual, indeed, we entertain a more unmitigated contempt than, for any other character in our history.  The fondness with which a portion of the church regards his memory, can be compared only to that perversity of affection which sometimes leads a mother to select the monster or the idiot of the family as the object of her especial favour, Mr. Hallam has incidentally observed, that, in the correspondence of Laud with Strafford, there are no indications of a sense of duty towards God or man.  The admirers of the Archbishop have, in consequence, inflicted upon the public a crowd of extracts designed to prove the contrary.  Now, in all those passages, we see nothing, which a prelate as wicked as Pope Alexander or Cardinal Dubois might not have written.  Those passages indicate no sense of duty to God or man, but simply a strong interest in the prosperity and dignity of the order to which the writer belonged; an interest which, when kept within certain limits, does not deserve censure, but which can never be considered as a virtue.  Laud is anxious to accommodate satisfactorily the disputes in the University of Dublin.  He regrets to hear that a church is used as a stable, and that the benefices of Ireland are very poor.  He is desirous that, however small a congregation may be, service should be regularly performed.  He expresses a wish that the judges of the court before which questions of tithe are generally brought should be selected with a view to the interest of the clergy.  All this may be very proper; and it may be very proper that an alderman should stand up for the tolls of his borough, and an East India director for the charter of his Company.  But it is ridiculous to say that these things indicate piety and benevolence.  No primate, though he were the most abandoned of mankind, could wish to see the body, with the influence of which his own influence was identical, degraded in the public estimation by internal dissensions, by the ruinous state of its edifices, and by the slovenly performance of its rites.  We willingly acknowledge that the particular letters in question have very little harm in them; a compliment which cannot often be paid either to the writings or to the actions of Laud.

Bad as the Archbishop was, however, he was not a traitor within the statute.  Nor was he by any means so formidable as to be a proper subject for a retrospective ordinance of the legislature.  His mind had not expansion enough to comprehend a great scheme, good or bad.  His oppressive acts were not, like those of the Earl of Strafford, parts of an extensive system.  They were the luxuries in which a mean and irritable disposition indulges itself from day to day, the excesses natural to a little mind in a great place.  The severest punishment which the two Houses could have inflicted on him would have been to set him at liberty