Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 7.djvu/291

Rh I may have work for you,—not now; lie there and persevere to rot. You are not yet quite wicked and corrupt enough for this comparison. Go, get ye gone, last the sun turn back at night of ye!

Come up, thou heap of wickedness, George Jeffries thy hands deep purple with the blood of thy murdered follow-men! Ah, I know thee! awful and accursed shade I two hundred years after thy death, men hate thee still, not without cause I Let me look upon thee! I know thy history. Pause and be still, whue I tell it to these men.

Brothers, George Jeffries "began in the sedition line." "There was no act, however bad, that he would not resort to, to get on." "He was of a bold aspeot, and oared not for the countenance of any man." "He became the avowed, unblushing slave of the court and the bitter persecutor and unappeasable enemy of the principles he had before supported.. He "was universally insolent and overbearing." "As a judge, he did not consider the decencies of his post, nor did he so much as affect to be impartial, as became a judge." His face and voice were always unamiable. "All tenderness for the feelings of others, all self-respect, were obliterated from his mind." He had "a delight in misery, merely as misery," and " that temper which tyrants require in their worst instruments." "He made haste to sell his forehead of brass and his tongue of venom to the court." He had "more impudence than ten carted street-walkers;" and was appropriately set to a work " which could be trusted to no mail who reverenced law, or who was sensible of shame." He was a " Commissioner" in 1685, You know of the "Bloody assizes" which he held, and how he sent to execution three hundred and twenty persons in a single circuit. "The whole country was strewed with the heads and limbs of his victims." Yet a man wrote that "a little more hemp might have been usefully employed." He was the worst of the English judges. "There was no measure, however illegal, to the execution of which he did not devotedly and recklessly abandon himself." "During the Stuart reigns, England was cursed by a succession of ruffians in ermine, who, for the sake of court favour, wrested the principles of law, the precepts of religion, and the duties of humanity;