gh the Bar towards
Somerset House, full of vague notions of riot, and perhaps (delicious
thought!) plunder. But at St. Mary's, Commissioner Mayne and his men in
the blue tail-coats received the roughs in battle array, and at the
first charge the coward mob broke and fled.

In 1815, No. 68, Chancery Lane, not far from the north-east corner, was
the scene of an event which terminated in the legal murder of a young
and innocent girl. It was here, at Olibar Turner's, a law stationer's,
that Eliza Fenning lived, whom we have already mentioned when we entered
Hone's shop, in Fleet Street. This poor girl, on the eve of a happy
marriage, was hanged at Newgate, on the 26th of July, 1815, for
attempting to poison her master and mistress. The trial took place at
the Old Bailey on April 11th of the same year, and Mr. Gurney conducted
the prosecution before that rough, violent, unfeeling man, Sir John
Sylvester (_alias_ Black Jack), Recorder of London, who, it is said,
used to call the calendar "a bill of fare." The arsenic for rats, kept
in a drawer by Mr. Turner, had been mixed with the dough of some yeast
dumplings, of which all the family, including the poor servant, freely
partook. There was no evidence of malice, no suspicion of any ill-will,
except that Mrs. Turner had once scolded the girl for being free with
one of the clerks. It was, moreover, remembered that the girl had
particularly pressed her mistress to let her make some yeast dumplings
on the day in question. The defence was shamefully conducted. No one
pressed the fact of the girl having left the dough in the kitchen for
some time untended; nor was weight laid on the fact of Eliza Fenning's
own danger and sufferings. All the poor, half-paralysed, Irish girl
could say was, "I am truly innocent of the whole charge--indeed I am. I
liked my place. I was very comfortable." And there was pathos in those
simple, stammering words, more than in half the self-conscious
diffuseness of tragic poetry. In her white bridal dress (the cap she had
joyfully worked for herself) she went to her cruel death, still
repeating the words, "I am innocent." The funeral, at St. George the
Martyr, was attended by 10,000 people. Curran used to declaim eloquently
on her unhappy fate, and Mr. Charles Phillips wrote a glowing rhapsody
on this victim of legal dulness. But such mistakes not even Justice
herself can correct. A city mourned over her early grave; but the life
was taken, and there was no