acuteness, wit, and learning of Dunning may be traced through many pages, remarks occasionally occur which could hardly have proceeded from a practising lawyer. I can find no authority in support of the general belief of his being the author. I suspect he only revised it, and that Lord Chatham did the same. There are passages strongly partaking of the spirit and peculiar mode of expression of the latter. Some interesting extracts might be made from this able tract. The following severe censure of Lord Mansfield must have been written by one who well knew the character he was describing. “I wish that when a Chief is found to be clandestinely meddling in matters of State in perversion of the law, he may be dragged into broad day-light, and his name and memory be branded for ever to the latest posterity. I cannot indeed figure to myself a meaner or more pernicious person than a chief justice, with a great income for life given him by the public, in order to render him independent, privately listening to every inclination of every ministry, and warping and wire-drawing the plain letter of the law in order to accommodate it to their inclinations, instead of pursuing the course of established precedents, inviolably, intrepidly, and openly, without regard to party or person. The chapter of expediency is the very worst source of adjudication, inasmuch as it tends to the setting afloat, by degrees, of the whole law of the realm. “In our law the judges are bound by a sacred oath to determine according to the known laws and ancient customs of the realm, set down in judicial decisions and resolutions of learned, wise, and upright judges, upon a variety of particular facts and cases, which, when they have been thus in use, and practised time out of mind, are a part of the common law of the kingdom * * * ‘To allow of any man’s discretion,’ says Lord Coke, ‘that sits in the seat of justice, would bring forth a monstrous confusion.’ It is indeed wonderful that any man should have so servile a disposition; for let his abilities be what they will, he will always be regarded as a contemptible personage. This sort of profligate magistrate may be sure of being used by every ministry, but of being esteemed by none; seeing no set of men can depend upon him any longer than they remain in office and power, his only principle of action being an implicit obedience to the old tutelar Saint at St. James’s. He must be in truth-- ‘A timorous foe, and a suspicious friend, Dreading even fools:’ and cowardice in a judge is but another name for corruption.” P. 85.--E.