I hope it will be no disadvantage to me my not
summing up my evidence like a lawyer. I think I have
made it plainly appear that there never was any formal
quarrel or malice between Mr Montford and me. I have also
made appear the reason why we stayed so long in the
street, which was for Mr Hill to speak with Mrs
Bracegirdle and ask her pardon, and I stayed with him as
my friend. So plainly appeareth I had no hand in killing
Mr Montford, and upon the confidence of my own innocency
I surrendered myself to this honourable house, where I
know I shall have all the justice in the world."

The trial, which lasted five days, resulted in a verdict of
acquittal--sixty-nine peers voting Lord Mohun "Not Guilty," and fourteen
finding him "Guilty."

One would have thought that such a severe lesson and narrow escape would
have given Mohun pause in his career of vice and crime. On the contrary,
it seems merely to have whetted his appetite for similar adventures. He
plunged into still deeper dissipation; one mad revel succeeded another;
duel followed duel, all without provocation on any part but his own. He
killed in cold blood two more men who had innocently provoked his
enmity, "as if increase of appetite did grow by that it fed on," until
he rightly became the most dreaded and hated man in all England, a man
to whom a glance, a gesture, or a harmless word might mean death.

But his evil days were drawing to their end; and appropriately he died
in a welter of innocent blood. When the Duke of Hamilton was appointed
Ambassador to the French Court, the Whigs were so alarmed by his known
partiality for the Pretender that the more unscrupulous of them decided
that, at any cost, he must be got rid of. What simpler plan could there
be than by provoking him to a duel; what fitter tool than the
fire-eating, bloodthirsty Mohun, the most skilled swordsman of his day?

Mohun jumped at the vile suggestion, and lost no time in seeking the
Duke and insulting him in public. His Grace, however, who knew the man's
reputation only too well, treated the insult with the silence and
contempt it deserved; whereupon Mohun, roused to fury by this studied
slight, changed his _role_ to that of challenger. Thrice he sent his
second, one Major-General Macartney, almost as big a scoundrel as
himself, to the Duke's house in St James's Square; the fourth time a
meeting was arranged for the following morning at th