Let me own that the old Judge was sincerely sorry when this incident was concluded. So long as the contest lasted, while he was penning his epistle or waiting for the reply, his excitement rallied and sustained him. He used to sit after the despatch of one of his cutting letters calculating with himself the terror and consternation it produced, just as the captain of a frigate might have waited with eager expectancy that the smoke might drift away and show him the shattered spars or the yawning bulwarks of his enemy. But when his last missive was returned unopened, and the messenger reported that the doctor's carriage was at her Ladyship's door as he came away, the Judge collapsed at once, and all the dreariness of his deserted condition closed in upon him. Till Sewell returned to-town, Sir William resolved not to proceed farther with respect to the registrarship. His plan, long determined upon, was to induct him into the office, administer the oaths, and leave him to the discharge of the duties. The scandal of displacing an official would, he deemed, be too great a hazard for any government to risk. At all events, if such a conflict came, it would be a great battle, and with the nation for spectators. “The country shall ring with it,” was the phrase he kept repeating over and over as he strolled through his neglected garden or his leafy shrubberies; but as he plodded along, alone and in silence, the dreary conviction would sometimes shoot across his mind that he had run his race, and that the world had wellnigh forgotten him. “In a few days more,” sighed he out, “it will be over, and I shall be chronicled as the last of them.” And for a moment it would rally him to recall the glorious names with which he claimed companionship, and compare them--with what disparagement!--with the celebrities of the time. It was strange how bright the lamp of intellect would shine out as the wick was fast sinking in the socket. His memory would revive some stormy scene in the House, some violent altercation at the Bar, and all the fiery eloquence of passion would recur to him, stirring his heart and warming his blood, till he half forgot his years, and stood forth, with head erect and swelling chest, strong with a sense of power and a whole soul full of ambition. “Beattie would not let me take my Circuit,” would he say. “I wish he saw me to-day. Decaying powers! I would tell them that the Coliseum is grander in its ruin than all their stuccoed plastering in its trim propriety. Had he suffered me to go, the grand jury would have heard a charge such as men's ears have not listened to since Avonmore! Avon-more! what am I saying?--Yelverton had not half my law, nor a tenth part of my eloquence.”