The _Judge_ by whom the principal cause was tried, and the plaintiffs non-suited, is styled, we see "_the Town Clerk_:" the more appropriate and respected title would not on this occasion have been ill-applied to him. Except what we have here been seeing, we know nothing of him that is _positive_: but, seeing thus much of him, we see that he was an honest man: and an honest man is not ill portrayed by negatives. He had no coronet playing before his eyes: no overpaid places and sinecures for relatives. He had not been made judge, for publishing a liturgy of the church of Diana, with an embroidery composed of his own comments,--or for circulating, with anonymous delicacy, a pious warning, never to be absent from the shrine of Diana, when the sacred cup was, proffered by the hands of holy priests. Accordingly, when the charge of _blasphemy_ was brought before him,--being a heathen, he found no difficulty in treating it, in that gentle and soothing mode, in which, when, from the bosom of an established church it enters into a man, the spirit, which calls itself the spirit of Christianity, renders him so averse to the treating it. If, when his robes were off, he spoke of Diana what we now think of her,--he did not, when they were on, foam or rave, declare--that all, who would not swear to their belief in her, were not fit to be believed, or so much as fit to live. By him, one man was not robbed of his rights, because another man, when called upon as a witness, refused to perjure himself. By him, a man was not refused to be heard as a witness, nor refused protection for the fruits of his industry, nor deprived of the guardianship of his children, because he waited to see Diana, before he declared himself a believer in her existence. In the open theatre was pronounced the judgment we have seen. He did not, by secret sittings, deprive men of the protection of the public eye. He did not, we may stand assured--for we see how far the people of Ephesus were from being tame enough to endure it--he did not keep men's property in his hands, to be plundered by himself, his children, or his creatures, till the property was absorbed, and the proprietors sent broken-hearted to their graves. He did not--for the people of Ephesus would not have endured it--wring out of distress a princely income, on pretence of giving decisions, declaring all the while his matchless incapacity for everything but prating or raising doubts. He did not display,--he could not have displayed--the people of Ephesus could not have endured it--any such effrontery, as, when a judicatory was to sit upon his conduct, to set himself down in it, and assume and carry on the management of it. He would not have sought impunity--for if he had sought it in Ephesus, he would not have found it there--he would not have sought impunity, in eyes lifted up to heaven, or streaming with crocodile tears.