Mr.Bertram was no sooner possessed of the judicial authority which he had so much longed for than he began to exercise it with more severity than mercy, and totally belied all the opinions which had hitherto been formed of his inert good-nature.

We have read somewhere of a justice of peace who, on being nominated in the commission, wrote a letter to a bookseller for the statutes respecting his official duty in the following orthography--'Please send the ax relating to a gustus pease.' No doubt, when this learned gentleman had possessed himself of the axe, he hewed the laws with it to some purpose.

Mr.Bertram was not quite so ignorant of English grammar as his worshipful predecessor; but Augustus Pease himself could not have used more indiscriminately the weapon unwarily put into his hand.
In good earnest, he considered the commission with which he had been entrusted as a personal mark of favour from his sovereign; forgetting that he had formerly thought his being deprived of a privilege, or honour, common to those of his rank was the result of mere party cabal.
He commanded his trusty aid-de-camp, Dominie Sampson, to read aloud the commission; and at the first words, 'The King has been pleased to appoint'-- 'Pleased!' he exclaimed in a transport of gratitude; 'honest gentleman! I'm sure he cannot be better pleased than I am.' Accordingly, unwilling to confine his gratitude to mere feelings or verbal expressions, he gave full current to the new-born zeal of office, and endeavoured to express his sense of the honour conferred upon him by an unmitigated activity in the discharge of his duty.

New brooms, it is said, sweep clean; and I myself can bear witness that, on the arrival of a new housemaid, the ancient, hereditary, and domestic spiders who have spun their webs over the lower division of my bookshelves (consisting chiefly of law and divinity) during the peaceful reign of her predecessor, fly at full speed before the probationary inroads of the new mercenary.

Even so the Laird of Ellangowan ruthlessly commenced his magisterial reform, at the expense of various established and superannuated pickers and stealers who had been his neighbours for half a century.