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from God, and the degradation of passions participated with brutes; and in the accident of their alternate ascendancy shuddering at the terrors of an hereafter, or embracing the horrid hope of annihilation. What is this wondrous world of his

residence?

"A mighty maze, and all without a plan ;"

a dark and desolate and dreary cavern, without wealth, or ornament or order. But light up within it the torch of knowledge, and how wondrous the transition ! The seasons change, the atmosphere breathes, the landscape lives, earth unfolds its fruits, ocean rolls in its magnificence, the heavens display their constellated canopy, and the grand animated spectacle of nature rises revealed before him, its varieties regulated, and its mysteries resolved! The phenomena which bewilder, the prejudices which debase, the superstitions which enslave, vanish before education. Like the holy symbol which blazed upon the cloud before the hesitating Constantine, if man follow but its precepts, purely, it will not only lead him to the victories of this world, but open the very portals of Omnipotence for his admission. Cast your eye over the monumental map of ancient grandeur, once studded with the stars of empire and the splendors of philosophy. What erected the little state of Athens into a powerful commonwealth, placing in her hand the scepter of legislation, and wreathing round her brow the imperishable chaplet of literary fame? what extended Rome, the haunt of banditti, into universal empire? what animated Sparta with that high, unbending, adamantine courage, which conquered nature herself, and has fixed her in the sight of future ages, a model of public virtue, and a proverb of national independence? What but those wise public institutions which strengthened their minds with early application, informed their infancy with the principles of action, and sent them into the world, too vigilant to be deceived by its calms, and too vigorous to be shaken by its wirlwinds?

PHILLIPS.

APPEAL TO THE JURY IN BEHALF OF GUTHRIE.

I Do not doubt that you will discharge yourselves of it as becomes your characters. I am sure, indeed, that you will mourn with me over the almost solitary defect in our otherwise matchless system of jurisprudence, which leaves the perpetrators of sich an injury as this subject to no amercement but that of

money. I think you will lament the failure of the great Cicero of our age, to bring such an offense within the cognizance of a criminal jurisdiction; it was a subject suited to his legislative mind, worthy of his feeling heart, worthy of his immortal eloquence. I cannot, my lord, even remotely allude to Lord Erskine, without gratifying myself by saying of him, that, by the rare union of all that was learned in law with all that was lucid in eloquence, by the singular combination of all that was pure in morals with all that was profound in wisdom; he has stamped upon every action of his life the blended authority of a great mind and an unquestionable conviction. I think, gentlemen, you will regret the failure of such a man in such an object. The merciless murderer may have manliness to plead; the highway robber may have want to palliate; yet they both are objects of criminal infliction but the murderer of connubial bliss, who commits his crime in secrecy the robber of domestic joys, whose very wealth, as in this case, may be his instrument

he is suffered to calculate on the infernal fame which a superflous and unfelt expenditure may purchase. The law, however, is so, and we must only adopt the remedy it affords us. In your adjudication of that remedy, I do not ask too much, when I ask the full extent of your capability; how poor, even so, is the wretched remuneration for an injury which nothing can repair, for a loss which nothing can alleviate? Do you think that a mine could recompense my client for the forfeiture of her who was dearer than life to him?

"Oh, had she been but true,

Though heaven had made him such another world
Of one entire and perfect chrysolite,

He'd not exchange her for it!"

I put it to any of you, what would you take to stand in his situation? What would you take to have your prospects blasted, your profession despoiled, your peace ruined, your bed profaned, your parents heart-broken, your children parentless?

Believe, gentlemen, if it were not for those children, he would not come here to-day to seek such remuneration; if it were not that, by your verdict, you may prevent those little innocent defrauded wretches from becoming wandering beggars, as well as orphans on the face of this earth. Oh, I know I need not ask this verdict from your mercy; I need not extort it from your compassion; I will receive it from your justice. I do conjure you, not as fathers, but as husbands : not as husbands, but as ritizens: not as citizens, but as men :— - not as men, but as Christians by all your obligations, public, private, inoral, aud religious; by the hearth profaned; by the home desolated;

:

by the canons of the living God foully spurned;-save, oh! save your firesides from the contagion, your country from the crime, and perhaps thousands, yet unborn, from the shame, and sin, and sorrow of this example!

PHILLIPS.

AN APPEAL TO THE JURY

I WILL not now stop to inquire whose property the city may be considered to be; but the learned gentleman seems to forget, that the election by that city, to whomsoever it may belong, is absolutely void, without the approbation of that very lord lieutenant, who is the prosecutor in this case. I do therefore repeat, gentlemen, that not a man of you has been called in that box by the voice of my client; that he has had no power to object to a single man among you, though the crown has: and that you yourselves must feel under what influence you are chosen, or for what qualifications you are particularly selected. At a moment when this wretched land is shaken to its center by the dreadful contuts of the different branches of the community; between those who call themselves the partisans of liberty, and those that call themselves the partisans of power: between the advocates of infliction, and the advocates of suffering; upon such a question as the present, and at such a season, can any man be at a loss to guess from what class of character and opinion a friend to either party would resort for that jury, which was to decide between both? I trust, gentlemen, you know me too well to suppose that I could be capable of treating you with any personal disrespect; I am speaking to you in the honest confidence of your fellow-citizen. When I allude to those unworthy imputations of supposed bias, or passion, or partiality, that may have marked you out for your present situation, I do so in order to warn you of the ground on which you stand, of the point of awful responsibility in which you are placed, to your conscience, and to your country; and to remind you, that if you have been put into that box from any unworthy reliance on your complaisance or your servility, you have it your power before you leave it, to refute and to punish so vile an expectation by the integrity of your verdict; to remind you that you have it in your power to show to as many Irishraen as yet linger in this country, that all law and justice have not taken their flight with our prosperity and peace; that the sanctity of an oath, and the honesty of a

juror are not dead amongst us; and that if our courts of justice are superseded by so many strange and terrible tribunals, it is not because they are deficient either in wisdom or virtue.

CURRAN.

THE FALLEN WIFE.

WELL might she lament over her fallen fortunes! well might she mourn over the memory of days when the sun of heaven seemed to rise but for her happiness! well might she recall the home she had endeared, the children she had nursed, the hapless husband, of whose life she was the pulse! But one short week before, this earth could not reveal a lovelier vision:- virtue blessed, affection followed, beauty beamed on her: the light of every eye, the charm of every heart, she moved along in cloudless chastity, cheered by the song of love, and circled by the splendors she created! Behold her now, the loathsome refuse of an adulterous bed; festering in the very infection of her crime; the scoff and scorn of their unmanly, merciless, inhuman author! But thus it ever is with the votaries of guilt; the birth of their crime is the death of their enjoyment; and the wretch who flings his offering on its altar, falls an immediate victim to the flame of his devotion. I am glad it is so; it is a wise, retributive dispensation; it bears the stamp of a preventive Providence. I rejoice it is so, in the present instance, first, because this premature infliction must insure repentance in the wretched sufferer and next, because, as this adulterous fiend has rather acted on the suggestions of his nature than his shape, by rebelling against the finest impulse of man, he has made himself an outlaw from the sympathies of humanity. Why should he expect that charity. from you, which he would not spare even to the misfortunes he had inflicted? For the honor of the form in which he is disguised, I am willing to hope he was so blinded by his vice, that he did not see the full extent of those misfortunes. If he had feelings capable of being touched, it is not to the faded victim of her own weakness, and of his wickedness, that I would direct them. There is something in her crime which affrights charity from its commiseration.

PHILLIPS.

THE SAME, CONTINUED.

BUT, gentlemen, there is one, over whom pity may mourn, for he is wretched; and mourn without a blush, for he is guilt

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less. How shall I depict to you the deserted husband? To every other object in this catalogue of calamity there is one stain attached which checks compassion. But here - oh! if ever there was a man amiable, it was that man - oh! if ever there was a husband fond, it was that husband. His hope, his joy, his ambition was domestic; his toils were forgotten in the affections of his home; and amid every adverse variety of fortune, hope pointed to his children, - and he was comforted. By this vile act that hope is blasted, that house is a desert, those children are parentless! In vain do they look to their surviving parent his heart is broken, his mind is in ruins: his very form is fading from the earth. He had one consolation, an aged mother, on whose life the remnant of his fortunes hung, and on whose protection of his children his remaining prospects rested; even that is over; she could not survive his shame, she never raised her head, she became hearsed in his misfortune ; — he has followed her funeral. If this be not the climax of human misery, tell me in what does human misery consist? Wife, parent, fortune, prospects, happiness, all gone at once, and gone forever! For my part, when I contemplate this, I do not wonder at the impression it has produced on him; I do not wonder at the faded form, the dejected air, the emaciated countenance, and all the ruinous and moldering trophies, by which misery has marked its triumph over youth, and health, and happiness? I know, that in the hordes of what is called fashionable life, there is a sect of philosophers, wonderfully patient of their fellow-creatures' sufferings; men too insensible to feel for any one, or too selfish to feel for others. I trust there is not one amongst you who can even hear of such calamities without affliction; or if there be, I pray that he may never know their import by experience; that having, in the wilderness of this world, but one dear darling object, without whose participation bliss would be joyless, and in whose sympathies sorrow has found a charm; whose smile has cheered his toil, whose love has pillowed his misfortunes, whose angelspirit, guiding him through danger, and darkness, and despair, amid the world's frown and the friend's perfidy, was more than friend, and world, and all to him! - God forbid, that by a villain's wile, or a villain's wickedness, he should be taught how to appreciate the woe of others in the dismal solitude of his own. Oh, no! I feel that I address myself to human beings, who, knowing the value of what the world is worth, are capable of appreciating all that makes it dear to us.

PHILLIPS.

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