butt of the unthinking and the monster of the crowd. My lord, I have now
done! To you, whom the law deems the prisoner's counsel,--to you,
gentlemen of the jury, to whom it has delegated his fate,--I leave the
chances of my life."

The prisoner ceased; but the same heavy silence which, save when broken
by one solitary murmur, had lain over the court during his speech, still
continued even for several moments after that deep and firm voice had
died on the ear. So different had been the defence of the prisoner from
that which had been expected; so assuredly did the more hackneyed part of
the audience, even as he had proceeded, imagine that by some artful turn
he would at length wind into the usual courses of defence,--that when his
unfaltering and almost stern accents paused, men were not prepared to
feel that his speech was finished, and the pause involuntarily jarred on
them as untimeous and abrupt. At length, when each of the audience
slowly awoke to the conviction that the prisoner had indeed concluded his
harangue, a movement, eloquent of feelings released from a suspense,
which had been perhaps the more earnest and the more blended with awe,
from the boldness and novelty of the words on which it hung, circled
round the court. The jurors looked confusedly at each other, but not one
of them spoke, even by a whisper; their feelings, which had been aroused
by the speech of the prisoner, had not from its shortness, its
singularity, and the haughty impolicy of its tone, been so far guided by
its course as to settle into any state of mind clearly favourable to him,
or the reverse; so that each man waited for his neighbour to speak first,
in order that he might find, as it were, in another, a kind of clew to
the indistinct and excited feelings which wanted utterance in himself.

The judge, who had been from the first attracted by the air and aspect of
the prisoner, had perhaps, notwithstanding the hardness of his mind, more