Through such souls alone
God stooping shows sufficient of His light
For us i' the dark to rise by. And I rise."

After _Pompilia_, we have the pleadings and counterpleadings of the
lawyers on either side: _Dominus Hyacinthus de Archangelis, Pauperum
Procurator_ (the counsel for the defendant), and _Juris Doctor
Johannes-Baptista Bottinius_, _Fisci et Rev. Cam. Apostol. Advocatus_
(public prosecutor). Arcangeli,--

"The jolly learned man of middle age,
Cheek and jowl all in laps with fat and law,
Mirthful as mighty, yet, as great hearts use,
Despite the name and fame that tempt our flesh,
Constant to the devotion of the hearth,
Still captive in those dear domestic ties!"--

is represented, with fine grotesque humour, in the very act of making
his speech, pre-occupied, all the while he "wheezes out law and
whiffles Latin forth," with a birthday-feast in preparation for his
eight-year-old son, little Giacinto, the pride of his heart. The effect
is very comic, though the alternation or intermixture of lawyer's-Latin
and domestic arrangements produces something which is certainly, and
perhaps happily, without parallel in poetry. His defence is, and is
intended to be, mere quibbling. _Causa honoris_ is the whole pith and
point of his plea: Pompilia's guilt he simply takes for granted.
Bottini, the exact opposite in every way of his adversary,--

"A man of ready smile and facile tear,
Improvised hopes, despairs at nod and beck,
And language--ah, the gift of eloquence!
Language that goes as easy as a glove
O'er good and evil, smoothens both to one"--

Bottini presents us with a full-blown speech, intended to prove
Pompilia's innocence, though really in every word a confession of her
utter depravity. His sole purpose is to show off his cleverness, and he
brings forward objections on purpose to prove how well he can turn them
off; assumes guilt for the purpose of arguing it into comparative
innocence.

"Yet for the sacredness of argument, ...
Anything, anything to let the wheels
Of argument run glibly to their goal!"

He pretends to "paint a saint," whom he can still speak of, in tones of
earnest admiration, as "wily as an eel." His implied concessions and
merely parenthetic denials, his abominable insinuations and suggestions,
come, evidently enough, from the instincts of a grovelling mind,
literally incapable of apprecia