a week. By that time all the world was agitated with the case;
literally not the city only, vast as that city was, but the nation was
convulsed and divided into parties upon the question, Whether the
prosecution were one of mere malice or not? The very government of the
land was reported to be equally interested, and almost equally divided
in opinion. In this state of public feeling came the trial. Image to
yourself, oh reader, whosoever you are, the intensity of the excitement
which by that time had arisen in all people to be spectators of the
scene--then image to yourself the effect of all this, a perfect
consciousness that in herself as a centre was settled the whole mighty
interest of the exhibition--that interest again of so dubious and mixed
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