that was worthiest in the human character. He kept a too fearful conscience ever to be truly eminent in public life, but no kinder, humbler, humaner gentleman ever walked the earth than Joseph Brudenell.
"It is to be feared that the closing days of this good man's life were darkened by tragedy. The present writer was sitting with him in the smoking-*room of a club, when a fellow member, an occupant of the Episcopal bench, carried over to him the evening paper containing the confession of the man Burcell in whose stead John Davis had suffered the extreme penalty a few days before. It would engage the pen of a dramatist to portray the self-*righteousness of the bishop and the horror and bewilderment of the judge. 'It has overtaken me at last,' said the old judge, covering his eyes as though he had been poor blind Œdipus. 'This is the shadow that has darkened my life during twenty-five years.'
"His distress will never be forgotten by those who witnessed it. From that hour he was never the same. The tragic suddenness of his end was not unforeseen by those who knew him best. Yet to the last he was the same gentle, courteous compound of scholarship and refinement. In no sense could he ever have been looked upon as brilliant. No epigrams, no pregnant sayings, no flashes of wit are recorded of him; upon the bench he was too much in earnest even to be genial. Every cause that came before him appeared to engage the very blood of his veins and the whole life of his intellect. It was a ruthless kind of irony that fixed upon such shoulders as these the responsibility for as
