ellent advocate. He began with a long preliminary flourish on the
importance of the case. He said that he should with the most scrupulous
delicacy avoid every remark calculated to raise unnecessary prejudice
against the prisoner. He should not allude to his unhappy notoriety, his
associations with the lowest dregs. (Here up jumped the counsel for the
prisoner, and Mr. Dyebright was called to order.) "God knows," resumed
the learned gentleman, looking wistfully at the jury, "that my learned
friend might have spared himself this warning. God knows that I would
rather fifty of the wretched inmates of this county jail were to escape
unharmed than that a hair of the prisoner you behold at the bar should
be unjustly touched. The life of a human being is at stake; we should be
guilty ourselves of a crime which on our deathbeds we should tremble to
recall, were we to suffer any consideration, whether of interest or of
prejudice, or of undue fear for our own properties and lives, to bias
us even to the turning of a straw against the unfortunate prisoner.
Gentlemen, if you find me travelling a single inch from my case,--if
you find me saying a single word calculated to harm the prisoner in your
eyes, and unsupported by the evidence I shall call,--then I implore you
not to depend upon the vigilance of my learned friend, but to treasure
these my errors in your recollection, and to consider them as so many
arguments in favour of the prisoner. If, gentlemen, I could by any
possibility imagine that your verdict would be favourable to the
prisoner, I can, unaffectedly and from the bottom of my heart,
declare to you that I should rejoice; a case might be lost, but a
fellow-creature would be saved! Callous as we of the legal profession
are believed, we have feelings like you; and I ask any one of you,
gentlemen of the jury, any one who has ever felt the pleasures of social
intercourse, the joy of charity, the heart's reward of benevolence,--I
ask any one of you, whether, if he were placed in the arduous situation
I now hold, all the persuasions of vanity would not vanish at once from
his mind, and whether his defeat as an advocate would not be rendered
dear to him by the common and fleshly sympathies of a man. But,
gentlemen" (Mr. Dyebright's voice at once deepened and faltered), "there
is a duty, a painful duty, we owe to our country; and never, in the long
course of my professional experience, do I remember an instance in which
it was mo