Legal biography abounds with ghastly stories that illustrate the insensibility with which the hanging judges in past generations used to don the black cap jauntily, and smile at the wretched beings whom they sentenced to death. Perhaps of all such anecdotes the most thoroughly sickening is that which describes the conduct of Jeffreys, when, as Recorder of London, he passed sentence of death on his old and familiar friend, Richard Langhorn, the Catholic barrister--one of the victims of the Popish Plot phrensy. It is recorded that Jeffreys, not content with consigning his friend to a traitor's doom, malignantly reminded him of their former intercourse, and with devilish ridicule admonished him to prepare his soul for the next world. The authority which gives us this story adds, that by thus insulting a wretched gentleman and personal associate, Jeffreys, instead of rousing the disgust of his auditors, elicited their enthusiastic applause.
In a note to a passage in one of the Waverley Novels, Scott tells a story of an old Scotch judge, who, as an enthusiastic chess-player, was much mortified by the success of an ancient friend, who invariably beat him when they tried their powers at the beloved game. After a time the humiliated chess-player had his day of triumph. His conqueror happened to commit murder, and it became the judge's not altogether painful duty to pass upon him the sentence of the law. Having in due form and with suitable solemnity commended his soul to the divine mercy, he, after a brief pause, assumed his ordinary colloquial tone of voice, and nodding humorously to his old friend, observed--"And noo, Jammie, I think ye'll alloo that I hae checkmated you for ance."
Of all the bloodthirsty wearers of the ermine, no one, since the opening of the eighteenth century, has fared worse than Sir Francis Page--the virulence of whose tongue and the cruelty of whose nature were marks for successive satirists. In one of his Imitations of Horace, Pope says--
"Slanderer, poison dread from Delia's rage, Hard words or hanging, if your judge be Page."
In the same spirit the poet penned the lines of the 'Dunciad'--
"Mortality, by her false guardians drawn, Chicane in furs, and Casuistry in lawn, Gasps, as they straighten at each end the cord, And dies, when Dulness gives her----the Sword."