ich devolves upon me as leading law officer of the
Crown, forces me into a course which I cannot avoid, unless I should
shrink from promoting and accomplishing the ends of public justice. In
my position, and in the discharge of my solemn duties here to-day, I can
recognize no man's rank, no man's wealth, nor the prestige of any man's
name. So long as he stands at that bar, charged with great and heinous
crimes, I feel it my duty to strip him of all the advantages of his
birth and rank, and consider him simply a mere subject of the realm.

"In order to show you, gentlemen of the jury, the animux under which
the prisoner at the bar acted, in the case before us, I must go back
a little--a period of some months. At that time a highly respectable
gentleman of an ancient and honored family in this country was one
evening on his way home from this town, attended, as usual, by his
servant. At a lonely place on a remote and antiquated road, which they
took as a shorter way, it so happened that, in consequence of a sudden
mist peculiar to those wild moors, they lost their path, and found
themselves in circumstances of danger and distress. The servant,
however, whistled, and his whistle was answered; a party of men, of
freebooters, of robbers, headed by a person called the Red Rapparee, who
has been convicted at these assizes, and who has been the scourge of the
country for years, came up to them, and as the Rapparee had borne this
respectable gentleman a deadly and implacable enmity for some time past,
he was about to murder both master and man, and actually had his musket
levelled at him, as others of his gang had at his aged servant, when
a person, a gentleman named Reilly--[there there was a loud cheer
throughout the court, which, however, was soon repressed, and the
Attorney-General proceeded]--this person started out from an old ruin,
met the robber face to face, and, in short, not only saved the lives of
the gentleman and his servant, but conducted them safely home. This act
of courage and humanity, by a Roman Catholic to a Protestant, had such
an effect upon the old gentleman's daughter, a lady whose name has
gone far and wide for her many virtues and wonderful beauty, that an
attachment was formed between the young gentleman and her. The prisoner
at the bar, gentlemen, was a suitor for her hand; but as the young and
amiable lady was acquainted with his character as a priest-hunter and
persecutor, she, though herself a Prot