that my life has not passed through a career of
outrage without scattering some few benefits on the road. In destroying
me, it is true that you will have the consolation to think that
among the benefits you derive from my sentence will be the salutary
encouragement you give to other offenders to offend to the last, degree,
and to divest outrage of no single aggravation! But if this does not
seem to you any very powerful inducement, you may pause before you
cut off from all amendment a man who seems neither wholly hardened
nor utterly beyond atonement. My lord, my counsel would have wished to
summon witnesses,--some to bear testimony to redeeming points in my own
character, others to invalidate the oath of the witness against me,--a
man whom I saved from destruction in order that he might destroy me. I
do not think either necessary. The public Press has already said of
me what little good does not shock the truth; and had I not possessed
something of those qualities which society does not disesteem, you would
not have beheld me here at this hour! If I had saved myself as well as
my companions, I should have left this country, perhaps forever, and
commenced a very different career abroad. I committed offences; I eluded
you; I committed what, in my case, was an act of duty: I am seized, and
I perish. But the weakness of my body destroys me, not the strength of
your malice. Had I" (and as the prisoner spake, the haughty and rapid
motion, the enlarging of the form, produced by the passion of the
moment, made impressively conspicuous to all the remarkable power of his
frame),--"had I but my wonted health, my wonted command over these limbs
and these veins, I would have asked no friend, no ally, to favour my
escape. I tell you, engines and guardians of the law, that I would have
mocked your chains and defied your walls, as ye know that I have mocked
and defied them before. But my blood creeps now only in drops through
its courses; and the heart that I had of old stirs feebly and heavily
within me." The prisoner paused a moment, and resumed in an altered
tone: "Leaving, then, my own character to the ordeal of report, I cannot
perhaps do better than leave to the same criterion that of the witness
against me. I will candidly own that under other circumstances it might
have been otherwise. I will candidly avow that I might have then used
such means as your law awards me to procure an acquittal and to prolong
my existence,--though i