t of good-humoured sparring was allowed, in
which the witnesses thought that they had the best of it. The men
of Tankerville long remembered this trial, and hoped anxiously that
there might soon be another. The only man treated with severity was
poor Phineas Finn, and luckily for himself he was not present. His
qualifications as member of Parliament for Tankerville were somewhat
roughly treated. Each witness there, when he was asked what candidate
would probably be returned for Tankerville at the next election,
readily answered that Mr. Browborough would certainly carry the seat.
Mr. Browborough sat in the Court throughout it all, and was the hero
of the day.

The judge's summing up was very short, and seemed to have been given
almost with indolence. The one point on which he insisted was the
difference between such evidence of bribery as would deprive a man
of his seat, and that which would make him subject to the criminal
law. By the criminal law a man could not be punished for the acts
of another. Punishment must follow a man's own act. If a man were
to instigate another to murder he would be punished, not for the
murder, but for the instigation. They were now administering the
criminal law, and they were bound to give their verdict for an
acquittal unless they were convinced that the man on his trial had
himself,--wilfully and wittingly,--been guilty of the crime imputed.
He went through the evidence, which was in itself clear against the
old sinner, and which had been in no instance validly contradicted,
and then left the matter to the jury. The men in the box put their
heads together, and returned a verdict of acquittal without one
moment's delay. Sir Gregory Grogram and his assistants collected
their papers together. The judge addressed three or four words almost
of compliment to Mr. Browborough, and the affair was over, to the
manifest contentment of every one there present. Sir Gregory Grogram
was by no means disappointed, and everybody, on his own side in
Parliament and on the other, thought that he had done his duty very
well. The clean-sweeping Commissioners, who had been animated with
wonderful zeal by the nature and novelty of their work, probably felt
that they had been betrayed, but it may be doubted whether any one
else was disconcerted by the result of the trial, unless it might be
some poor innocents here and there about the country who had been
induced to believe that bribery and corruption were in