same with delirium, raving, or distraction. It is used also for any ridiculous, extravagant imagination, action, or proposition, a chimera, or vision. But the most ordinary use of the word among English writers, is for a deep disorderly musing or meditation.

Reversal of Judgment, in law. A judgment may be falsified, reversed, or voided, in the first place, without a writ of error, for matters foreign to or beyond the record, that is, not apparent upon the face of it; so that they cannot be assigned for error in the superior court, which can only judge from what appears in the record itself; and therefore, if the whole record be not certified, or not truly certified, by the inferior court, the party injured thereby (in both civil and criminal cases) may allege a diminution of the record, and cause it to be rectified. Thus, if any judgment whatever be given by persons who had no good commission to proceed against the person condemned, it is void; and may be falsified by shewing the special matter, without writ of error. As, where a commission issues to A and B, and twelve others, or any two of them, of which A or B shall be one, to take and try indictments; and any of the other twelve proceed without the interposition or presence of either A or B: in this case all proceedings, trials, convictions, and judgments, are void for want of a proper authority in the commissioners, and may be falsified upon bare inspection, without the trouble of a writ of error; it being a high misdemeanor in the judges so proceeding, and little (if anything) short of murder in them all, in case the person so attainted be executed and suffer death. So likewise if a man purchases land of another; and afterwards the vendor is, either by outlawry, or his own confession, convicted and attainted of treason or felony previous to the sale or alienation; whereby such land becomes liable to forfeiture or escheat: now, upon any trial, the purchaser is at liberty, without bringing any writ of error, to falsify not only the time of the felony or treason supposed, but the very point of the felony or treason itself; and is not concluded by the confession or the outlawry of the vendor; though the vendor himself is concluded, and not suffered now to deny the fact, which he has by confession or flight acknowledged. But if such attainder of the vendor was by verdict, on the oath of his peers, the silence cannot be received to falsify or contradict the fact of the crime committed; though he is at liberty to prove a mistake in time, or that the offence was committed after the alienation, and not before.

Secondly, a judgment may be reversed, by writ of error; which lies from all inferior criminal jurisdictions to the court of king's-bench, and from the king's-bench to the house of peers; and may be brought for notorious mistakes in the judgment or other parts of the record: as where a man is found guilty of perjury, and receives the judgment of felony, or for other less palpable errors; such as any irregularity, omission, or want of form in the process of outlawry, or proclamations; the want of a proper addition to the de- REVERSE of a medal, coin, &c. denotes the second or back side, in opposition to the head or principal figure.