credited with wild excesses. There was a story, believed at the time, of some early amour with the daughter of a Dean of Canterbury, to which the Duchess of Kingston alluded when on her trial at the House of Lords. Looking Thurlow, then Attorney-General, full in the face she said, "That learned gentleman dwelt much on my faults, but I too, if I chose, could tell a Canterbury tale."

   But with all his bitterness and sarcasm Lord Thur

   low had a genuine sense of humour, as the following story of his Cambridge days illustrates—days when he was credited with more disorderly pranks and impudent escapades than attention to study. "Sir," observed a tutor, "I never come to the window but I see you idling in the Court."—"Sir," replied the future Lord Chancellor, "I never come into the Court but I see you idling at the window."

   Mansfield was not credited with lively sensibility, but his humanity was shocked at the thought of killing a man for a trifling theft. Trying a prisoner at the Old Baily on the charge of stealing in a dwelling-house to the value of 40

    s.

   —when this was a capital offence—he advised the jury to find a gold trinket, the subject of the indictment, to be of less value. The prosecutor exclaimed with indignation, "Under 40

    s.

   , my lord! Why, the

    fashion

   alone cost me more than double the sum."—"God forbid, gentlemen, we should hang a man for fashion's sake," observed Lord Mansfield to the jury.

   An indictment was tried before him at the Assizes, preferred by parish officers for keeping an hospital for lying-in women, whereby the parish was burdened by illegitimate children. He expressed doubts whether this was an indictable offence, and after hearing arguments in support of it he thus gave his judgment. "We sit here under a Commission requiring us to

    deliver

   this gaol, and the statute has been cited to make it unlawful to

    deliver

   a woman who is with child. Let the indictment be 

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