considered--the generosity of the English audience was inclined
to regard his crime as the wayward aberration of a false idea of honour
rather than as flowing from a heart naturally savage, or perverted by
habitual vice. I shall never forget the charge of the venerable judge to
the jury, although not at that time liable to be much affected either by
that which was eloquent or pathetic.

"We have had," he said, "in the previous part of our duty" (alluding
to some former trials), "to discuss crimes which infer disgust and
abhorrence, while they call down the well-merited vengeance of the law.
It is now our still more melancholy task to apply its salutary though
severe enactments to a case of a very singular character, in which
the crime (for a crime it is, and a deep one) arose less out of the
malevolence of the heart, than the error of the understanding--less from
any idea of committing wrong, than from an unhappily perverted notion of
that which is right. Here we have two men, highly esteemed, it has been
stated, in their rank of life, and attached, it seems, to each other as
friends, one of whose lives has been already sacrificed to a punctilio,
and the other is about to prove the vengeance of the offended laws;
and yet both may claim our commiseration at least, as men acting in
ignorance of each other's national prejudices, and unhappily misguided
rather than voluntarily erring from the path of right conduct.

"In the original cause of the misunderstanding, we must in justice give
the right to the prisoner at the bar. He had acquired possession of the
enclosure, which was the object of competition, by a legal contract
with the proprietor, Mr. Ireby; and yet, when accosted with reproaches
undeserved in themselves, and galling, doubtless, to a temper at least
sufficiently susceptible of passion, he offered notwithstanding,
to yield up half his acquisition, for the sake of peace and good
neighbourhood, and his amicable proposal was rejected with scorn. Then
follows the scene at Mr. Heskett the publican's, and you will observe
how the stranger was treated by the deceased, and, I am sorry to
observe, by those around, who seem to have urged him in a manner which
was aggravating in the highest degree. While he asked for peace and
for composition, and offered submission to a magistrate, or to a mutual
arbiter, the prisoner was insulted by a whole company, who seem on this
occasion to have forgotten the national maxim of 'fai