ir, except Harvey's previous good character;
and good character, by the law of England, goes for nothing in opposition
to facts proved to the satisfaction of a jury. It was likewise most
unfortunate that A ---- was to be the presiding judge. This man possessed
great forensic acquirements, and was of spotless private character; but,
like the majority of lawyers of that day--when it was no extraordinary
thing to hang twenty men in a morning at Newgate--he was a staunch
stickler for the gallows as the only effectual reformer and safeguard of
the social state. At this time he was but partially recovered from a long
and severe indisposition, and the traces of recent suffering were
distinctly apparent on his pale and passionless features.

Harvey was arraigned in due form; the evidence was gone carefully
through; and everything, so far as I was concerned, was done that man
could do. But at the time to which I refer, counsel was not allowed to
address the court on behalf of the prisoner--a practice since introduced
from Scotland--and consequently I was allowed no opportunity to draw the
attention of the jury to the total want of any direct evidence of the
prisoner's guilt. Harvey himself tried to point out the unlikelihood of
his being guilty; but he was not a man gifted with dialectic qualities,
and his harangue fell pointless on the understandings of the twelve
common-place individuals who sat in the jury-box. The judge finally
proceeded to sum the evidence, and this he did emphatically _against_ the
prisoner--dwelling with much force on the suspicious circumstance of a
needy man taking up his abode at an expensive fashionable hotel; his
furtive descent from his apartments by the back stairs; the undoubted
fact of the watch being found in his trunk; the improbability of any one
putting it there but himself; and the extreme likelihood that the robbery
was effected in a few moments of time by the culprit, just as he passed
from the bar of the hotel to the room which he had occupied. "If," said
he to the jury, in concluding his address, "you can, after all these
circumstances, believe the prisoner to be innocent of the crime laid to
his charge, it is more than I can do. The thing seems to me as clear as
the sun at noonday. The evidence, in short, is irresistible; and if the
just and necessary provisions of the law are not enforced in such very
plain cases, then society will be dissolved, and security for property
there will be n