There is a new series of _State Trials_ continuing the old, and edited with a skill and completeness altogether lacking in its predecessor; yet its formal correctness gives an impression of dulness. You think with regret of Howell’s thirty-three huge volumes, that vast magazine of curiosities and horrors, of all that is best and worst in English history. How exciting life was long ago, to be sure, and how persistently it grows duller! What a price we pay for the smug comfort of our time! People shuddered of yore; did they yawn quite so often? Howell and the folk he edits knew how to tell a story. Judges, too, were not wont to exclude interesting detail for that it wasn’t evidence, and the compilers did not end with a man’s condemnation. They had too keen a sense of what was relished of the general: the last confession and dying speech, the exit on the scaffold or from the cart, are told with infinite gusto. What a terrible test earth’s great unfortunates underwent! Sir Thomas More’s delicate fencing with his judges, the exquisite courtesy wherewith he bade them farewell, make but half the record; you must hear the strange gaiety which flashed in the condemned cell and by the block ere you learn the man’s true nature. And to know Raleigh you must see him at Winchester under the brutal insults of Coke; “Thou art a monster, thou hast an English face but a Spanish heart;” again, “I thou thee, thou traitor!” and at Palace Yard, Westminster, on that dreary October morning urging the sheriff to hurry, since he would not be thought fear-shaken when it was but the ague; for these are all-important episodes in the life of that richly dressed, stately, and gallant figure your fancy is wont to picture in his Elizabethan warship sweeping the Spanish Main. Time would fail to tell of Strafford and Charles and Laud and a hundred others, for the collection begins with Thomas à Becket in 1163 and comes down to Thistlewood in 1820. Once familiar with those close packed, badly printed pages, you find therein a deeper, a more subtle charm than cunningest romance can furnish forth. The account of Mary Stuart’s ending has a finer hold than Froude’s magnificent and highly decorated picture--Study at first hand “Bloody Jeffreys,” his slogging of Titus Oates, with that unabashed rascal’s replies during his trial for perjury; or again, my Lord’s brilliant though brutal cross-examination of Dunn in the “Lady” Alice Lisle case, during the famous or infamous Western Circuit, and you will find Macaulay’s wealth of vituperative rhetoric, in comparison, tiresome and pointless verbiage. Also you will prefer to construct your own Braxfield from trials like those of Thomas Muir in 1793, and of Alexander Scott and Maurice Margarot in 1794, rather than accept the counterfeit presentment which Stevenson’s master-hand has limned in _Weir of Hermiston_.