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and ever must be, a public criminal: no technicality or contrivance that may save her head can change the spirit of the law, which unequivocally denounces her the greatest of criminals. The letter of the law may not come up to the spirit, or rather, the humanity of the age may find in its general indefiniteness an escape from putting in force its full severity; but in legislating a mitigated penalty, it sets a seal to the criminality of the offence for the punishment of which it is provided. If, therefore, the Queen be guilty, she is, by the spirit of the law, and by the acknowledgment of Parliament, a criminal. I put it to the common sense of the country, then-I put it to its pride-1 put it to its prudence, whether it would not be improper, disgraceful, and impolitic, to suffer its King, who marries for its interest, and not according to his own inclination, to remain the husband of a public criminal, the yokefellow of a state culprit.

JULIUS.

SIR,

LETTER XIV.

то THE SAME.

October 10, 1820.

I AM scarcely recovered from the vertigo of horror in which I dropped the speech of her Majesty's Attorney General from my hands, to be able to address you on the tendency of that outrageous compilation of sedition and menace. He, sir, who should induce old Charon to referry Arthur Thistlewood to the land of the liv ing by a promise of a more than equivalent consideration, in one who promulgates that clientage has claims upon advocacy for treason and civil confusion, would do our distracted country a service past all calculation. Are these times, sir-is this a fit crisis in which to practise what it is profanity to preach,-to aver that" an advocate knows no one on earth but his client; that to save him by any means is he bound; that separating his duty from his patriotism he must go on, reckless of consequences, though it should be his unhappy fate to involve his country in confusion?" A father's

yearnings, sir, knew another in the world beside his son, when Brutus gave the signal for execution that other was his country! Martyrology, sir, has registered "my country" in characters of blood, an idol to which one should do eternal homage, an object to be revered beyond the grey hairs of a parent, to be cherished beyond the wife of one's bosom, to be worshipped next to God. Yet is there a tie superior to all these, a tie stronger than kindred, indissoluble as eternity! That tie exists between an advocate and his client; it is created by a fee! Such is the doctrine of her Majesty's chief legal adviser; and had not man set it abroach, one would have exclaimed-Devil had.

Would it astonish the world, sir, to detect perjury in the progress of a defence, whose opening oration defined the duties of advocacy as illimitable, paramount to those of truth, feeling, or patriotism; and in the worst language of atrocious threatening, predicted the annihilation of the Judges and Jury, should they dare venture to return a verdict of guilty?

By marshalling the assumed consequences of conviction in terrifying array on the behalf of

acquittal, does not Mr. Brougham betray a consciousness that for the issue he craves, it is useless to address the justice, it is imperative to appeal to the fears of those who are to acquit or condemn? How discreditable to his ingenuity, how treacherous to his assertions, the vain, the belied boast of rejecting the high ground of recrimination, for the still higher ground of innocence! He recriminates, when in significant mysticism he envelopes a threat of recrimination, a "God forbid" its necessity; such conduct is more cruelly slanderous, more brutally unjust, than direct falsehood, or downright perjury. The latter may be contradicted; the former, like a shadow, cannot be grasped. Granting him, however, to have taken the higher ground of innocence, how long does he keep it? Out of his own mouth shall he answer this question. Imploring their Lordships to save their Country from" a civil war,” he proceeds---"You stand on the brink of a precipice---you may go on in your precipitate career---you may pronounce judgment against the Queen, but it will be the last judgment you will ever pronounce. Her persecutors will fail in their object, and the ruin with which they

seek to overwhelm the Queen will return to overwhelm themselves. Save the country, my Lords, from the horrors that await it-save yourselves from impending ruin." Enough!

To return to the anathema and prediction above mentioned; I would ask, is it an impossible case that, coupled with a biassed and interested miscalculation of the temper of the times, they might assure perjury to the hardened pitch for which it may contemplate more than the extravagance of promise, in the fullyexpected case of triumph; and popular protection, with amplest reward, in the little-contemplated case of defeat? You will perceive, sir, I am making an allusion; I cannot forbear from so doing.

Majocci's "these things are quite new to me," bears the stamp of a simplicity that knows not a lie. I trust that some of the witnesses for the Queen are not what they would fain prove Majocci; but I cannot help suspecting them. The balance of inducement to hazard any thing, I conceive to be on the side of those, whose eyes having been directed to the tumult excited

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