from, purely professional lore. A batch of interesting
trials is very commendable, and need not be afraid of occupying its own
ground. That of Courvoisier for the murder of Lord William Russel, of
the Wakefields for the abduction of Miss Turner, of Lord Cardigan for
shooting in a duel, and of John Ambrose Williams for a libel on the
Durham clergy, cannot by any stretch of fancy be converted into _state_
prosecutions, though they fairly enough find admittance into a book
which treats of our _causes celebres_. The 'state' trials of the volume
before us are the ha'porth of bread to the gallons of sack. The
legitimate is paraded to call attention from the spurious, the vulgar is
to find respectability by walking arm in arm with the classical. There
was really no necessity for the 'sham.' A crooked stick on a heath has
its picturesqueness as well as the Corinthian column. We may be very
interesting rascals though we do not poke our walking-canes into the
face of majesty, or go out on a fool's errand against the Queen's lieges
with Mr. John Frost." The author's style is described as very
unsatisfactory, though full of pretension. He is "very bombastic, very
inexact, and strangely independent in the current of his thoughts and in
the arrangement of his words." But the _Times_ admits nevertheless the
interesting quality of the work, and in its own better language gives
the following _resume_ of one of the most celebrated cases stated in
it:--

"Of all the trials contained in these volumes none have a more
melancholy interest, perhaps, than that of Mr. Stuart, who was tried on
the tenth of June, 1822, before the High Court of Justiciary at
Edinburgh, for killing Sir Alexander Boswell in a duel. Mr. Stuart was,
of course, acquitted. He had been the aggrieved party; he had found it
necessary to the vindication of his honor to call his unfortunate
antagonist to account; he had been forced, by the cruel exaction of
public opinion, to expose his life to the weapon of a man he had never
offended, and who, indeed, in his heart, bore his involuntary murderer
no malice; and public opinion, expressed in the verdict of a jury, knew
better than to sentence to death the wretched victim of its own brutal
and unwarrantable edicts. Fortunately for the interests of humanity, we
have at length reached a period when it becomes unnecessary to protest
vehemently against the iron rule of an authority more despotic than that
of absolute kings, and far