cases of this nature, which include crimes, so varied in their
circumstances that there appears no limit to the degree of guilt
incurred--crimes, the nature and character of which could not possibly
be foreseen or provided for, in all their infinite multiplicity of
detail; it seems probable that, in such cases, a large discretion may
have been purposely left by the framers of our constitution, in order
that the degree of guilt, on each occasion, should be measured by an
expansive self-adjusting scale of punishment, applied, indeed, and
administered by the judges of the land, but regulated and adjusted, in
each succeeding age, by the influence of public opinion, and by the
spirit and temper of the times.

Even at this latest stage of criminal prosecution, in the interval
which must necessarily elapse between the pronouncing and the
infliction of the sentence, the convicted delinquent is not without a
remedy for any wrong he may sustain in the act which terminates the
proceedings. If any judgement not warranted by law be given by the
court, it may be reversed upon a _writ of error_, which lies from all
inferior criminal jurisdictions to the Queen's Bench, and from the
Queen's Bench to the House of Peers. These writs, however, in cases of
misdemeanour, are not allowed, of course, but on probable cause shown
to the Attorney General; and then they are understood to be grantable
of common right, and _ex debito justitiæ_. The crown, if every other
resource has failed the prisoner, has always the power of exercising
the most amiable of its prerogatives. Though the sovereign herself
condemns no man, "the great operation of her sceptre is mercy," and
the chief magistrate, in the words of Sir William Blackstone, "holding
a court of equity in his own breast, to soften the rigour of the
general law, in such criminal cases as merit an exemption from
punishment," is ever at liberty to grant a free, unconditional, and