"Your conduct on the Bench, upon the recent trial, ’The Queen v. Hetherington,’ for a religious libel, a nominal and an impossible offence, the fiction of fraudulent bigotry, has much increased the high esteem in which you have been always held by the public. Your Lordship’s opinions on this impolitic, irreligious, and thoroughly infamous species of prosecution have oft-times been expressed with the integrity and high moral courage that have ever distinguished your public life. I never shall forget the manliness with which I heard you avow from the Whig Treasury Benches, in the House of Commons, in your place as Attorney General, your detestation of indictments for religious opinions; and the House hailed you when you fairly acknowledged your deep regret that, as Common Serjeant, you had been obliged, in obedience to your oath and to the law, to impose even the smallest punishment possible upon three men convicted by an ignorant Jury of a libel on the Scriptures; and you were still more cheerfully received when you expressed your joy at the liberation of the prisoners whom you had so unwillingly punished. There was one part of your speech that did not certainly satisfy me. I respect your sense of obligation to an oath; but when you punished men whom you conscientiously believed to be undeserving of infliction, and this ’in obedience to the law,’ your Lordship might have reflected, that it was not Parliamentary, but Judge-made law--’Common-law,’ as it is called; and you might have acted upon the principle that if a corrupt and ignorant Judge made a law to suit the prejudices of a brutal age, a pure and well-informed Judge might reverse that law in favour of an age more humane and more enlightened. I recollect with great satisfaction that when, in the case of Lord Langford, the Counsel, Mr. Thesiger, asked a witness (Mr. Nathan, a Jew) ’what religion he was of?’ your Lordship expressed your strong displeasure; and, under your Lordship’s sanction, the witness refused to answer the interrogatory, and treated both the query and the querist with the utmost contempt; and the whole Court and audience seemed strongly to approve of the result. In the recent trial your Lordship’s conduct was a contrast to that of your immediate predecessors on the Bench, Lords Tenterden and Ellenborough, the last representatives of a most disgraceful school of political, prejudiced, corrupt Court Judges. You did all in your power to induce the Jury to acquit the accused. I am now credibly informed that the Attorney-General had the same object at heart; and having, intentionally, gone in a most slovenly and unimpressive manner, through his technical duty, he was abashed and mortified when he heard the verdict of guilty. Familiar as he must be with the extreme ignorance, stupidity, and corruption of Juries, on such occasions, he was still surprised at such a verdict. I am willing to give him credit for these common reports in his favour;