ble an offender as she is supposed to be.

For, gentlemen, the prisoner at the bar, Miss Mary Blandy, a
gentlewoman by birth and education, stands indicted for no less a
crime than that of murder, and not only for murder, but for the
murder of her own father, and for the murder of a father
passionately fond of her, undertaken with the utmost deliberation,
carried on with an unvaried continuation of intention, and at last
accomplished by a frequent repetition of the baneful dose,
administered with her own hands. A crime so shocking in its own
nature and so aggravated in all its circumstances as will (if she is
proved to be guilty of it) justly render her infamous to the latest
posterity, and make our children's children, when they read the
horrid tale of this day, blush to think that such an inhuman
creature ever had an existence.

I need not, gentlemen, paint to you the heinousness of the crime of
murder. You have but to consult your own breasts, and you will know
it.

Has a murder been committed? Who ever beheld the ghastly corpse of
the murdered innocent weltering in its blood and did not feel his
own blood run slow and cold through all his veins? Has the murderer
escaped? With what eagerness do we pursue? With what zeal do we
apprehend? With what joy do we bring to justice? And when the
dreadful sentence of death is pronounced upon him, everybody hears
it with satisfaction, and acknowledges the justice of the divine
denunciation that, "By whom man's blood is shed, by man shall his
blood be shed."

If this, then, is the case of every common murderer, what will be
thought of one who has murdered her own father? who has designedly
done the greatest of all human injuries to him from whom she
received the first and greatest of all human benefits? who has
wickedly taken away his life to whom she stands indebted for life?
who has deliberately destroyed, in his old age, him by whose care
and tenderness she was protected in her helpless infancy? who has
impiously shut her ears against the loud voice of nature and of God,
which bid her honour her father, and, instead of honouring him, has
murdered him?

It becomes us, gentlemen, who appear here as counsel for the Crown,
shortly to open the history of this whole affair, that you may be
better able to attend to and understand the evidence we have to lay
before you. And though, in doing this, I will endeavour rather to
extenuate than to aggravate, yet I trust I have such