e considered, the generosity of the English audience
was inclined to regard his crime as the wayward aberration of a false
idea of honour rather than as flowing from a heart naturally savage, or
perverted by habitual vice. I shall never forget the charge of the
venerable judge to the jury, although not at that time liable to be
much affected either by that which was eloquent or pathetic.

"We have had," he said, "in the previous part of our duty (alluding to
some former trials), to discuss crimes which infer disgust and
abhorrence, while they call down the well-merited vengeance of the law.
It is now our still more melancholy task to apply its salutary though
severe enactments to a case of a very singular character, in which the
crime, for a crime it is, and a deep one, arose less out of the
malevolence of the heart than the error of the understanding--less from
any idea of committing wrong than from an unhappily perverted notion of
that which is right. Here we have two men, highly esteemed, it has
been stated, in their rank of life, and attached, it seems, to each
other as friends, one of whose lives has been already sacrificed to a
punctilio, and the other is about to prove the vengeance of the
offended laws and yet both may claim our commiseration at least, as men
acting in ignorance of each other's national prejudices, and unhappily
misguided rather than voluntarily erring from the path of right conduct.

"In the original cause of the misunderstanding, we must in justice give
the right to the prisoner at the bar. He had acquired possession of
the inclosure, which was the object of Competition, by a legal contract
with the proprietor, Mr. Ireby; and yet, when accosted with reproaches
undeserved in themselves, and galling doubtless to a temper at least
sufficiently susceptible of passion, he offered notwithstanding to
yield up half his acquisition, for the sake of peace and good
neighbourhood, and his amicable proposal was rejected with scorn. Then
follows the scene at Mr. Heskett the publican's, and you will observe
how the stranger was treated by the deceased, and, I am sorry to
observe, by those around, who seem to have urged him in a manner which
was aggravating in the highest degree. While he asked for peace and
for composition, and offered submission to a magistrate, or to a mutual
arbiter, the prisoner was insulted by a whole company, who seem on this
occasion to have forgotten the national maxim of 'fair