was transferred by the illustrious commoner from Minister to Minister, as though no virtue could possibly be found in any Government without his presence.  When Junius affected to regard Lord Mansfield as the incarnation of all that is odious in humanity, his praise of Lord Chatham knew no bounds; yet it is well known that under another disguise Junius dealt far severer blows against the patriot than he ever inflicted upon a man born, as he says, to abet despotism in its hateful attempts to trample upon the people’s rights.  Nothing can be more inconsistent than the accusations brought by Junius against Lord Mansfield.  In one and the same breath he charges him with assuming an arbitrary power of doing right; so that if he does wrong it lies only between him and his conscience; and with condescending to evasive, indirect courses, in the temper of a quibbler.  Now the Chief Justice is something more than a lawyer, now considerably less.  At one moment he is setting common law at defiance, at another he is twisting the law to the purposes of corruption, and taking refuge behind the forms which he is expressly charged with heroically setting at defiance.  Had Lord Mansfield been less timorous, Junius might have been less daring.  At the close of one of his letters the reckless assailant writes “Beware how you indulge the first emotions of your resentment.  This paper is delivered to the world, and cannot be recalled.  The prosecution of an innocent printer cannot alter facts nor refute arguments.  Do not furnish me with further materials against yourself.”  Another venomous diatribe ends with a similar threat.  Dare “to represent this charge as a contempt of the authority of the House of Peers, and move their Lordships to censure the publisher of this paper, and I affirm that you support injustice by violence; that you are guilty of a heinous aggravation, of your offense; and that you contribute your utmost influence to promote, on the part of the highest court of judicature, a positive denial of justice to the nation!” Junius traded up on the invincible infirmity of a judge, who might have been destroyed by his weakness had he not been upheld by his unsullied purity and fame.

The attacks of Junius were not without effect on Parliament.  A motion was made in the House of Commons for “a committee to inquire into the proceedings of the judges in Westminster Hall, particularly in cases relating to the liberty of the press.”  In the House of Lords Lord Chatham and Lord Camden re-echoed the charges of the House of Commons, and while the latter warned noble lords how they received the opinions in that House of the “most experienced lawyers” upon questions of law, the former, in his accustomed style, threatened to ring again and again “the alarm-bell of liberty,” until he “could rouse the people to a proper sense of their injuries.”  Stung by persecution Lord Mansfield suffered himself to be betrayed into unaccountable error.  Intimating one day that he had something of importance to bring