It is hardly necessary to reply to the graver charges of moral guilt adduced by the able and unscrupulous author to whom we have referred. The spirit in which they are conceived may be estimated from the unmeasured vituperation of the Scotch in general, which forms the opening of the forty-first letter of Junius, addressed to Lord Mansfield. His lordship’s knowledge of English law has been impugned; his innovations upon its doctrines have been censured; his application and extension of its principles have been questioned; and his constitutional doctrines have been often and justly condemned; but we do not believe that his honesty has been seriously doubted, since the violence of party animosity has ceased to inflame men’s passions and pervert their judgment. Our knowledge of Lord Mansfield’s private history is very limited. His life however seems to have been spent in happiness and tranquillity, until the riots of 1780, in which his house, with its contents, was destroyed. Beside a valuable property in books, pictures, and furniture, he sustained that loss which, to a literary man, is irreparable,—the collected manuscripts of a laborious life. He bore this heavy calamity with honourable fortitude, and declined to accept of pecuniary compensation. To the application of government he returned this answer: “I think it does not become me to claim or expect reparation from the state. I have made up my mind to my misfortune as I ought, with this consolation, that it came from those whose object manifestly was general confusion and destruction at home, in addition to a dangerous and complicated war abroad. If I should lay before you any account or computation of the pecuniary damage I have sustained, it might seem a claim or expectation of being indemnified.” Shortly afterwards he appeared in the House of Lords, to justify the strong measures by which the riots had been quelled. “It was wonderful,” says Bishop Newton in his ‘Life and Anecdotes,’ “after such a shock as he had received, that he could so soon summon his faculties as to make one of the finest and ablest speeches that ever was heard in parliament, to justify the legality of the late proceedings on the part of government, to demonstrate that no royal prerogative had been exerted, no martial law had been exercised, nothing had been done but what every man, civil or military, had a right to do in the like cases. ‘I speak not from books,’ he said, ‘for books I have none;’ having been all consumed in the fire. The effects of his speech were the admiration and conviction of all who heard him, and put an end to the debate without division. Lord Mansfield never appeared greater in any action of his life.” No particular cause connected with the frenzy of the time can be assigned for this attack on the Chief Justice; he had not been active in supporting the measures for the relief of the Catholics, which produced this remarkable ebullition of folly and wickedness.