There is a passage in the _Life of Sir Matthew Hale_ which has struck us as not only interesting in itself, from the breadth and rectitude of judgment which it discloses, but also from the very direct bearing of the principle involved in it on some of the recent interdicts of the Supreme Civil Court. It serves to throw a kind of historic light, if we may so speak, on the judicial talent of our country in the present age as exhibited by the majority of our judges of the Court of Session--such a light as the ecclesiastical historian of a century hence will be disposed to survey it in, when coolly exercising his judgment on the present eventful struggle. One of not the least prominent nor least remarkable features of the Rebellion of 1745, says a shrewd chronicler of this curious portion of our history, was an utter destitution of military talent among the general officers of the British army. And the time is in all probability not very distant, in which the extreme lack of judicial genius betrayed by our courts of law in their present collision with the courts ecclesiastical, shall be regarded, in like manner, as one of the more striking characteristics of the _Rebellion_ of the present day. Sir Matthew Hale, as most of our readers must be aware, was a devoted Royalist. He was rising in eminence as a barrister at the time the Civil Wars broke out, and during that troublesome period he was employed as counsel for almost all the more eminent men of the King's party who were impeached by the Parliament. He was counsel for the Earl of Strafford, for Archbishop Laud, for the Duke of Hamilton, for the Earl of Holland, and for Lords Capel and Craven; and in every instance he exhibited courage the most unshrinking and devoted, and abilities of the highest order. When threatened in open court on one occasion by the Attorney-General, he replied that the threat might be spared: he was pleading in defence of those laws which the Government had declared it would maintain and preserve, and no fear of personal consequences should deter him in such circumstances from doing his duty to his client. When Charles himself was brought to his trial, Sir Matthew came voluntarily forward, and offered to plead for him also; but as the King declined recognising the competency of his judges, the offer was of course rejected. We all know how Malesherbes fared for acting a similar part in France. The counsel of Louis XVI. closed his honourable career on the scaffold not long after his unfortunate master: his generous advocacy of the devoted monarch cost him his life. But Cromwell, that 'least flagitious of all usurpers,' according to even Clarendon's estimate, was no Robespierre; and were we called on to illustrate by a single instance from the history of each the very opposite characters of the Puritan Republicans of England and the Atheistical Republican of France, we would just set off against one another the fate of Malesherbes and the treatment of Sir Matthew.