plained to a magistrate through the door, who promised
to mention my case to the chairman of the sessions, but the chairman
happened to be brother of one of those who had signed my commitment, and
the court broke up without my obtaining the smallest relief.
Exasperation of mind, now joined to the heat of the weather, which was
excessive, rapidly wasted my health and impaired my faculties. I felt my
memory sensibly affected, and could not connect my ideas through any
length of reasoning, but by writing, which many days I was wholly
unfitted for by the violence of continual headache."

There is a pathos about this plain, unvarnished story that appeals to
every heart. That a man, no matter what his crimes, should have his
nervous system thus cruelly undermined; that his physical and mental
faculties should be slowly but surely filched from him in this
deliberate fashion, is an idea not to be borne with composure by anyone
whose breast is susceptible to human impulses. But Robert Gourlay was no
great criminal. He had engaged in no plot to blow up King, Lords and
Commons. He had been guilty of no treason or felony. He had threatened
no man's life, and taken no man's purse upon the highway. He was by no
means the stuff of which great criminals are made. He was not even a
vicious or immoral man. He was an affectionate husband, a fond and
indulgent father. His story, from beginning to end, even when subjected
to the fiercest light that can be thrown upon it, discloses nothing
cruel or revengeful, nothing vile or outrageously wicked, nothing
grovelling or base, nothing sordid or mean. On the other hand, it
discloses a man of many noble and generous impulses; a man with a great
heart in his bosom which could warmly sympathize with the wrongs of his
fellow-creatures; a man in whom was no selfishness or greed; a man of
decided principles and stainless morals; who was incapable of dishonesty
or cruelty; who had a high sense of human responsibility; who feared his
God and honoured his King. When we compare his virtuous and honourable,
albeit turbulent and much misguided life, with that of any one of his
immediate persecutors, the contrast is mournfully suggestive of Mr.
Lowell's antithesis about

"Truth forever on the scaffold; wrong forever on the throne."

To what, then, was his long and bitter persecution to be attributed? Why
had he been deprived of his liberty; thrust into a dark and unwholesome
dungeon; refused the benefi