st, told all of it that
it will import that the reader should hear. He, indeed,--unfortunate
one,--will have heard the most of that story twice or thrice before.
But the audience in the Court of Queen's Bench still listened with
breathless attention, while, under this new head of his story he
told every detail again with much greater length than he had done in
the prelude which has been here given. He stated the facts of the
Cumberland marriage, apologizing to his learned friend the Serjeant
for taking, as he said, the very words out of his learned friend's
mouth. He expatiated with an eloquence that was as vehement as it
was touching on the demoniacal schemes of that wicked Earl, to whom,
during the whole of his fiendish life, women had been a prey. He
repudiated, with a scorn that was almost terrible in its wrath, the
idea that Josephine Murray had gone to the Earl's house with the name
of wife, knowing that she was, in fact, but a mistress. She herself
was in court, thickly veiled, under the care of one of the Goffes,
having been summoned there as a necessary witness, and could not
control her emotion as she listened to the words of warm eulogy with
which the adverse counsel told the history of her life. It seemed
to her then that justice was at last being done to her. Then the
Solicitor-General reverted again to the two Italian women,--the
Sicilian sisters, as he called them,--and at much length gave his
reasons for discrediting the evidence which he himself had sought,
that he might use it with the object of establishing the claim of his
client. And lastly, he described the nature of the possessions which
had been amassed by the late Earl, who, black with covetousness as he
was with every other sin, had so manipulated his property that almost
the whole of it had become personal, and was thus inheritable by a
female heiress. He knew, he said, that he was somewhat irregular
in alluding to facts,--or to fiction, if any one should call it
fiction,--which he did not intend to prove, or to attempt to prove;
but there was something, he said, beyond the common in the aspect
which this case had taken, something in itself so irregular, that he
thought he might perhaps be held to be excused in what he had done.
"For the sake of the whole Lovel family, for the sake of these two
most interesting ladies, who have been subjected, during a long
period of years, to most undeserved calamities, we are anxious to
establish the truth.