ich, when he rigidly confined himself to pointing
out the facts and the conclusiveness of the evidence. Another man was
convicted at Manchester of an attempt to murder his wife. He had stabbed
her several times in the neck, but happened to miss a fatal spot; and he
cross-examined her very brutally on the trial. Fitzjames, in delivering
sentence, told him that a man who had done the same thing, but with
better aim, 'stood at the last assizes where you now stand, before the
judge who is now sentencing you. The sentence upon him was that he
should be hanged by the neck till he was dead, and he was hanged by the
neck till he was dead.' The words emphatically pronounced produced a
dead silence, with sobs from the women in court. It was, he proceeded,
by a mere accident that the result of the prisoner's crime was
different, and that, therefore, the gravest sentence was the only proper
sentence; and that is 'that you be kept in penal servitude for the term
of your natural life.' This again was spoken with extreme earnestness:
and the 'life' sounded like a blow. There was a scream from the women,
and the prisoner dropped to the ground as if he had been actually
struck. Fitzjames spoke as if he were present at the crime, and uttering
the feelings roused by the ferocious treatment of a helpless woman.

Some of his letters record his sense of painful responsibility when the
question arose as to reprieving a prisoner. He mentions a case in which
he had practically had to decide in favour of carrying out a capital
sentence. 'For a week before,' he writes, 'I had the horrible feeling of
watching the man sinking, and knowing that I had only to hold out my
hand to save his life. I felt as if I could see his face and hear him
say, "Let me live; I am only thirty-five; see what a strong, vigorous,
active fellow I am, with perhaps fifty years before me: must I die?" and
I mentally answered, Yes, you must. I had no real doubts and I feel no
remorse; but it was a very horrible feeling--all the worse because when
one has a strong theoretical opinion in favour of capital punishment one
is naturally afraid of being unduly hard upon a particular wretch to
whom it is one's lot to apply the theory.' On another occasion he
describes a consultation upon a similar case with Sir W. Harcourt, then
Home Secretary. Both of them felt painfully the contrast with their old
free conversations, and discussed the matter with the punctilious
ceremony correspondi