He said that he should with the most scrupulous delicacy avoid every
remark calculated to raise unnecessary prejudice against the prisoner.
He should not allude to his unhappy notoriety, his associations with the
lowest dregs. (Here up jumped the counsel for the prisoner, and Mr.
Dyebright was called to order.) "God knows," resumed the learned
gentleman, looking wistfully at the jury, "that my learned friend might
have spared himself this warning. God knows that I would rather fifty of
the wretched inmates of this county jail were to escape unharmed than
that a hair of the prisoner you behold at the bar should be unjustly
touched. The life of a human being is at stake; we should be guilty
ourselves of a crime which on our deathbeds we should tremble to recall,
were we to suffer any consideration, whether of interest or of prejudice,
or of undue fear for our own properties and lives, to bias us even to the
turning of a straw against the unfortunate prisoner. Gentlemen, if you
find me travelling a single inch from my case,--if you find me saying a
single word calculated to harm the prisoner in your eyes, and unsupported
by the evidence I shall call,--then I implore you not to depend upon the
vigilance of my learned friend, but to treasure these my errors in your
recollection, and to consider them as so many arguments in favour of the
prisoner. If, gentlemen, I could by any possibility imagine that your
verdict would be favourable to the prisoner, I can, unaffectedly and from
the bottom of my heart, declare to you that I should rejoice; a case
might be lost, but a fellow-creature would be saved! Callous as we of
the legal profession are believed, we have feelings like you; and I ask
any one of you, gentlemen of the jury, any one who has ever felt the
pleasures of social intercourse, the joy of charity, the heart's reward
of benevolence,--I ask any one of you, whether, if he were placed in the
arduous situation I now hold, all the persuasions of vanity would not
vanish at once from his mind, and whether his defeat as an advocate would
not be rendered dear to him by the common and fleshly sympathies of a