Though not gifted with oratorical powers which were likely to gain him employment as a leader, Gaselee's reputation for legal knowledge soon recommended him to a judge's place. He was accordingly selected on July 1st, 1824, to fill a vacancy in the Court of Common Pleas. In that Court he sat for nearly fourteen years "with the character of a painstaking judge, and in his private capacity as a worthy and benevolent man." Thus Mr. Foss, F.S.A. The reader will have noted the Judge's severity to poor Groffin, the chemist, who had pleaded the danger of his boy mistaking oxalic acid for Epsom salts. Could it be that the Judge's experience as the son of a provincial doctor, had shown what class of man was before him? Later, unexpectedly, we learn that the Judge was a steady member for fourteen years of the Royal Humane Society, of which institution he was also a Vice-President. But we now come to a most extraordinary thing--the result of the young author's telling and most sarcastic portrait of the irascible little judge. It is curious that Forster, while enumerating various instances of Boz's severe treatment of living persons, as a sort of chastisement for their defects of manner or character, seems not to have thought of this treatment of the judge--and passes it by. Nor did he notice the prompt result that followed on the sketch. The report of the trial appeared in the March number, 1837--and we are told, the luckless judge retired from the Bench, shortly after the end of Hilary Term, that is in April or the beginning of May. We may assume that the poor gentleman could not endure the jests of his _confreres_ or the scarcely concealed tittering of the Barristers, all of whom had of course devoured and enjoyed the number. We may say that the learned Sergeant Buzfuz was not likely to be affected in any way by _his_ picture; it may indeed have added to his reputation. I confess to some sympathy for the poor old judge who was thus driven from the Bench. Sam Foote was much given to this sort of personal attack, and made the lives of some of his victims wretched. Boz, however, seems to have felt himself called upon to act thus as public executioner on two occasions only. After the fall of the judge in June, 1837, he wanted a model for a tyrannical magistrate in _Oliver Twist_--and Mr. Laing, the Hatton Garden Magistrate--a harsh, ferocious personage, at once occurred to him. He wrote accordingly to one of his friends that he wished to be _smuggled_ into his office some morning to study him. This "smuggling" of course meant the placing him where he would not be observed--as a magistrate knowing his "sketches" might recognise him. "I know the man perfectly well" he added. So he did, for he forgot that he had introduced him already in _Pickwick_ as Nupkins--whose talk is exactly alike, in places almost word for word to that of "Mr. Fang."