edth, perhaps the most innocent of the hundred, should
pay for all. We remember to have seen a mob assembled in Lincoln's Inn
to hoot a gentleman against whom the most oppressive proceeding known to
the English law was then in progress. He was hooted because he had been
an unfaithful husband, as if some of the most popular men of the age,
Lord Nelson for example, had not been unfaithful husbands. We remember a
still stronger case. Will posterity believe that, in an age in which men
whose gallantries were universally known, and had been legally proved,
filled some of the highest offices in the state and in the army,
presided at the meetings of religious and benevolent institutions, were
the delight of every society, and the favorites of the multitude, a
crowd of moralists went to the theatre, in order to pelt a poor actor
for disturbing the conjugal felicity of an alderman? What there was in
the circumstances either of the offender or of the sufferer to vindicate
the zeal of the audience we could never conceive. It has never been
supposed that the situation of an actor is peculiarly favorable to the
rigid virtues, or that an alderman enjoys any special immunity from
injuries such as that which on this occasion roused the anger of the
public. But such is the justice of mankind. In these cases the
punishment was excessive, but the offense was known and proved. The case
of Lord Byron was harder. True Jedwood justice was dealt out to him.
First came the execution, then the investigation, and last of all, or
rather not at all, the accusation. The public, without knowing any thing
whatever about the transactions in his family, flew into a violent
passion with him, and proceeded to invent stories which might justify
its anger. Ten or twenty different accounts of the separation,
inconsistent with each other, with themselves, and with common sense,
circulated at the same time. What evidence there might be for any one of
these the virtuous people who repeated them neither knew nor cared. For
in fact these stories were not the causes, but the effects of the public
indignation. They resembled those loathsome slanders which Lewis
Goldsmith, and other abject libellers of the same class, were in the
habit of publishing about Bonaparte; such as that he poisoned a girl
with arsenic when he was at the military school, that he hired a
grenadier to shoot Desaix at Marengo, that he filled St. Cloud with all
the pollutions of Capreae. There was