The view which many took of this culprit's case, may be represented by a letter from Boswell to Dr. Johnson. He says--"I own I am very desirous that the royal prerogative of remission of punishment should be employed to exhibit an illustrious instance of the regard which God's vicegerent will ever show to piety and virtue. If for ten righteous men, the Almighty would have spared Sodom, shall not a thousand acts of goodness done by Dr. Dodd counterbalance one crime? Such an instance would do more to encourage goodness than his execution would do to deter from vice." But neither this nor the speeches, the petitions, nay, not even the letters which Dr. Johnson wrote for Dr. Dodd to royalty itself, availed, and just before passing to execution he confessed that "his life for some few unhappy years past had been dreadfully erroneous." In one of his letters to the king, the fallen man, in language which Dr. Johnson had prepared, "confessed his crime, and owned both the enormity of its consequences and the danger of its example." He, at the same time, said, "I have not the confidence to petition for impunity, but humbly hope that public security may be established without the spectacle of a clergyman dragged through the streets to a death of infamy, amidst the derision of the profligate and profane; and that justice may be satisfied with irrevocable exile, perpetual disgrace, and hopeless penury." Every effort, however, was fruitless. Large sums of money were ready to bribe the turnkey to connive at an escape. A figure in wax, representing Dr. Dodd, was said to have been conveyed into the prison to aid the same object, but neither did that succeed; and, according to Dr. Johnson, he died on the scaffold "with pious composure and resolution." It was, indeed, a spectacle which might have touched the hearts of thousands, did aught but Omnipotent grace possess that power, to see a minister of religion conducted to Tyburn in such circumstances as we have described. We may deem the law severe, or think that the life of Dr. Dodd should have been spared; but his melancholy lot is not the less instructive. His whole history tells how feeble are human barriers against human guilt. And the consequences of this crime did not terminate with Dr. Dodd himself. He had married a Miss Perkins of Durham, but, left in sorrow, poverty, and disgrace, by her husband, reason forsook her, and she died a wretched maniac at Ilford in Essex. Is it not true that unthinking men, in pursuit of the wages of sin, scatter firebrands, and arrows, and death, though they say, Am not I in sport? THE ONLY GUIDE. THE TRUTH OUR SHIELD.