derers would
receive more sympathy than their victims, while fiends would escape to
the danger of society.

And yet that Judges have sympathy, and that it can be, and is, in
these days properly exercised, the following story will testify. I
give the story as Lord Brampton told it.]

In a circuit town a poor woman was tried before me for murdering her
baby. The facts were so simple that they can be told in a few words.
Her baby was a week old, and the poor woman, unable to sustain the
load of shame which oppressed her, ran one night into a river, holding
the baby in her arms. She had got into the water deep enough to drown
the baby, while her own life was saved by a boatman.

The scene was sad enough as she stood under a lamp and looked into the
face of the policeman, clutching her dead child to her breast, and
refusing to part with it.

At the trial there was no defence to the charge of wilful murder
except _one_, and that I felt it my duty to discountenance. I think
the depositions were handed to a young barrister by my order, and that
being so, I exercised my discretion as to the mode of defence. In
other words, I defended the prisoner myself.

In order to avoid the sentence that would have followed an acquittal
_on the ground of insanity_, which would have entailed perhaps
lifelong imprisonment, I took upon myself to depart from the usual
course, and ask the jury whether, _without being insane in the
ordinary sense, the woman might not have been at the time of
committing the deed in so excited a state as not to know what she was
doing_.

I thus avoided the technical form of question sane or insane, and
obtained a verdict of guilty, but that the woman at the time was not
answerable for her conduct, together with a strong recommendation
to mercy. This verdict, if not according to the strictest legal
quibbling, was according to justice.

I was about to pronounce sentence in accordance with the law, which it
was not possible for me to avoid, however much my mind was inclined to
do so, when the pompous old High Sheriff, all importance and dignity,
said,--

"My lord, are you not going to put on the black cap?"

"No," I answered, "I am not. I do not intend the poor creature to be
hanged, and I am not going to frighten her to death."

Addressing her by name, I said, "Don't pay any attention to what I am
going to read. No harm will be done to you. I am sure you did not know
in your great trouble and sorrow what