y name in Scotland for a man's cap.

XCIX. SPEECH ON THE TRIAL OF A MURDERER. (352)

Against the prisoner at the bar, as an individual, I can not have the
slightest prejudice. I would not do him the smallest injury or injustice.
But I do not affect to be indifferent to the discovery and the punishment
of this deep guilt. I cheerfully share in the opprobrium, how much soever
it may be, which is cast on those who feel and manifest an anxious concern
that all who had a part in planning, or a hand in executing this deed of
midnight assassination, may be brought to answer for their enormous crime
at the bar of public justice.

This is a most extraordinary case. In some respects it has hardly a
precedent anywhere; certainly none in our New England history. This bloody
drama exhibited no suddenly excited, ungovernable rage. The actors in it
were not surprised by any lionlike temptation springing upon their virtue,
and overcoming it before resistance could begin. Nor did they do the deed
to glut savage vengeance, or satiate long-settled and deadly hate. It was
a cool, calculating, money-making murder. It was all "hire and salary, not
revenge." It was the weighing of money against life; the counting out of
so many pieces of silver against so many ounces of blood.

An aged man, without an enemy in the world, in his own house, and in his
own bed, is made the victim of a butcherly murder for mere pay. Truly,
here is a new lesson for painters and poets. Whoever shall hereafter draw
the portrait of murder, if he will show it as it has been exhibited in an
example, where such example was last to have been looked for, in the very
bosom of our New England society, let him not give it the grim visage of
Moloch, the brow knitted by revenge, the face black with settled hate, and
the bloodshot eye emitting livid fires of malice. Let him draw, rather, a
decorous, smooth-faced, bloodless demon; a picture in repose, rather than
in action; not so much an example of human nature in its depravity, and in
its paroxysms of crime, as an infernal nature, a fiend in the ordinary
display and development of his character.

The deed was executed with a degree of self-possession and steadiness
equal to the wickedness with which it was planned. The circumstances, now
clearly in evidence, spread out the whole scene before us. Deep sleep had
fallen on the destined victim, and on all beneath his roof. A healthful
old man, to whom sleep was sweet,--the