The Court of Exchequer overflowed with business; for it was the only court at Dublin from which no writ of error lay to England, and consequently the only court in which the English could be oppressed and pillaged without hope of redress.

Rice, it was said, had declared that they should have from him exactly what the law, construed with the utmost strictness, gave them, and nothing more.

What, in his opinion, the law, strictly construed, gave them, they could easily infer from a saying which, before he became a judge, was often in his mouth.

"I will drive," he used to say, "a coach and six through the Act of Settlement." He now carried his threat daily into execution.

The cry of all Protestants was that it mattered not what evidence they produced before him; that, when their titles were to be set aside, the rankest forgeries, the most infamous witnesses, were sure to have his countenance.