the course of his
famous summing-up:

"A difficult form of virtue is quietly and unostentatiously
to obey what you believe to be God's will in your own lives.
It is not very easy to do that, and if you do it, you don't
make much noise in the world. It is very easy to turn upon
somebody who differs from you, and in the guise of zeal for
God's honor, to attack somebody who differs from you in point
of opinion, but whose life may be very much more pleasing to God,
whom you profess to honor, than your own. When it is done by
persons whose own lives are full of pretending to be better
than their neighbors, and who take that particular form of zeal
for God which consists in putting the criminal law in force
against somebody else--that does not, in many people's minds,
create a sympathy with the prosecutor, but rather with the
defendant. There is no doubt that will be so; and if they
should be men--I don't know anything about these persons--but
if they should be men who enjoy the wit of Voltaire, and who
do not turn away from the sneer of Gibbon, but rather relish
the irony of Hume--one's feelings do not go quite with the
prosecutor, but one's feelings are rather apt to sympathise
with the defendants. It is still worse if the person who takes
this course takes it not from a kind of rough notion that God
wants his assistance, and that he can give it--less on his own
account than by prosecuting other--or if it is mixed up with
anything of a partisan or political nature. Then it is impossible
that anything can be more foreign from one's notions of what is
high-minded, religious and noble. Indeed, I must say it strikes
me that anyone who would do that, not for the honor of God, but for
his own purposes, is entitled to the most disdainful disapprobation
that the human mind can form."

Some of the orthodox Tory journals censured Lord Coleridge for these
scathing remarks, but his lordship is not easily frightened by anonymous
critics, and it is probable that, if he ever has to try another case
like ours, he may denounce the prosecutors in still stronger language
if their motives are so obviously sinister as were those of Sir Henry
Tyler.

There was a great crowd of people outside the Mansion House on Tuesday
morning, May 11, and we were lustily cheered as we entered. Long before
t