What a fine India-rubber conscience Hacket, as well as his patron, must have had! Policy with innocency,' 'cunning with conscience,' lead up the dance to the tune of ''Tantara' rogues all!' Upon my word, I can scarcely conceive a greater difficulty than for an honest, warm-hearted man of principle of the present day so to discipline his mind by reflection on the circumstances and received moral system of the Stuarts' age (from Elizabeth to the death of Charles I), and its proper place in the spiral line of ascension, as to be able to regard the Duke of Buckingham as not a villain, and to resolve many of the acts of those Princes into passions, conscience-warped and hardened by half-truths and the secular creed of prudence, as being itself virtue instead of one of her handmaids, when interpreted by minds constitutionally and by their accidental circumstances imprudent and rash, yet fearful and suspicious; and with casuists and codes of casuistry as their conscience-leaders! One of the favorite works of Charles I was Sanderson 'de Juramento'. Ib. s. 200. Wherefore he waives the strong and full defence he had made upon stopping of an original writ, and deprecates all offence by that maxim of the law which admits of a mischief rather than an inconvenience: which was as much as to say, that he thought it a far less evil to do the lady the probability of an injury (in her own name) than to suffer those two courts to clash together again. All this is a tangle of sophisms. The assumption is, it is better to inflict a private wrong than a public one: we ought to wrong one rather than many. But even then, it is badly stated. The principle is true only where the tolerating of the private wrong is the only means of preventing a greater public wrong. But in this case it was the certainty of the wrong of one to avoid the chance of an inconvenience that might perchance be the occasion of wrong to many, and which inconvenience both easily might and should have been remedied by rightful measures, by mutual agreement between the Bishop and Chancellor, and by the King, or by an act of Parliament. Ib. s. 203. 'Truly, Sir, this is my dark lantern, and I am not ashamed to inquire of a Dalilah to resolve a riddle; for in my studies of divinity I have gleaned up this maxim, 'licet uti alieno peccato';--though the Devil make her a sinner, I may make good use of her sin.' Prince, merrily, 'Do you deal in such ware?' 'In good faith, Sir,' says the Keeper, 'I never saw her face.'