a character--sympathy in some with mere misfortune--sympathy in others
with female frailty and guilt, not perhaps founded upon an absolute
unwavering belief in her innocence, even amongst those who were most
loud and positive as partisans in affirming it,--and then remember that
all this hideous scenical display and notoriety settled upon one whose
very nature, constitutionally timid, recoiled with the triple agony of
womanly shame--of matronly dignity--of insulted innocence, from every
mode and shape of public display. Combine all these circumstances and
elements of the case, and you may faintly enter into the situation of
my poor Agnes. Perhaps the best way to express it at once is by
recurring to the case of a young female Christian martyr, in the early
ages of Christianity, exposed in the bloody amphitheatre of Rome or
Verona, to 'fight with wild beasts,' as it was expressed in mockery--
she to fight the lamb to fight with lions! But in reality the young
martyr _had_ a fight to maintain, and a fight (in contempt of that
cruel mockery) fiercer than the fiercest of her persecutors could have
faced perhaps--the combat with the instincts of her own shrinking,
trembling, fainting nature. Such a fight had my Agnes to maintain; and
at that time there was a large party of gentlemen in whom the
gentlemanly instinct was predominant, and who felt so powerfully the
cruel indignities of her situation, that they made a public appeal in
her behalf. One thing, and a strong one, which they said, was this:--
'We all talk and move in this case as if, because the question appears
doubtful to some people, and the accused party to some people wears a
doubtful character, it would follow that she therefore had in reality a
mixed character composed in joint proportions of the best and the worst
that is imputed to her. But let us not forget that this mixed character
belongs not to her, but to the infirmity of our human judgments--
_they_ are mixed--_they_ are dubious--but she is not--she is,
or she is not, guilty--there is no middle case--and let us consider for