d
affection can I expect here? There the prisoner sits. Look at him.
Look at the assemblage around you. Listen to their ill-suppressed
censures and their excited fears, and tell me where among my neighbors
or my fellow-men, where, even in his heart, I can expect to find a
sentiment, a thought, not to say of reward or of acknowledgment, or
even of recognition? Gentlemen, you may think of this evidence what
you please, bring in what verdict you can, but I asseverate before
Heaven and you, that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, the
prisoner at the bar does not at this moment know why it is that my
shadow falls on you instead of his own."

The gallows got its victim, but the post-mortem examination of the
poor creature showed to all the surgeons and to all the world that the
public were wrong, and William H. Seward was right, and that hard,
stony step of obloquy in the Auburn court-room was the first step of
the stairs of fame up which he went to the top, or to within one step
of the top, that last denied him through the treachery of American
politics. Nothing sublimer was ever seen in an American court-room
than William H. Seward, without reward, standing between the fury of
the populace and the loathsome imbecile. Substitution!

In the realm of the fine arts there was as remarkable an instance. A
brilliant but hypercriticised painter, Joseph William Turner, was met
by a volley of abuse from all the art galleries of Europe. His
paintings, which have since won the applause of all civilized nations,
"The Fifth Plague of Egypt," "Fishermen on a Lee Shore in Squally
Weather," "Calais Pier," "The Sun Rising Through Mist," and "Dido
Building Carthage," were then targets for critics to shoot at. In
defense of this outrageously abused man, a young author of twenty-four
years, just one year out of college, came forth with his pen, and
wrote the ablest and most famous essays on art that the world ever
saw, or ever will see--John Ruskin's "Modern Painters." For seventeen
years this author fought the battles of the maltreated artist, and
after, in poverty and broken-heartedness, the painter had died, and
the public tried to undo their cruelties toward him by giving him a
big funeral and burial at St. Paul's Cathedral, his old-time friend
took out of a tin box nineteen thousand pieces of paper containing
drawings by the old painter, and through many weary and uncompensated
months assorted and arranged them for public observati