"It is impossible almost to treat conduct of this kind with perfect
seriousness; yet I am aware that it ought to be more seriously accounted
for--because I am sure it has been a sort of paradox, which must have
struck Your Lordships, how any person having so many motives to
conceal--having so many reasons to dread detection--should yet go to work
so clumsily upon the subject. It is possible, indeed, that it may raise
this doubt--whether such a person is of sound mind enough to be a proper
object of punishment; or at least it may give a kind of confused notion,
that the guilt cannot be of so deep and black a grain, over which such a
thin veil was thrown, and so little trouble taken to avoid detection. I
am aware that, to account for this seeming paradox, historians, poets,
and even philosophers--at least of ancient times--have adopted the
superstitious solution of the vulgar, and said that the gods deprive men
of reason whom they devote to destruction or to punishment. But to
unassuming or unprejudiced reason, there is no need to resort to any
supposed supernatural interference; for the solution will be found in the
eternal rules that formed the mind of man, and gave a quality and nature
to every passion that inhabits in it.

"An Honorable friend of mine, who is now, I believe, near me,--a
gentleman, to whom I never can on any occasion refer without feelings of
respect, and, on this subject, without feelings of the most grateful
homage;--a gentleman, whose abilities upon this occasion, as upon some
former ones, happily for the glory of the age in which we live, are not
entrusted merely to the perishable eloquence of the day, but will live to
be the admiration of that hour when all of us are mute, and most of us
forgotten;--that Honorable gentleman has told you that Prudence, the
first of virtues, never can be used in the cause of vice. If, reluctant
and diffident, I might take such a liberty, I should express a doubt,
whether experience, observation, or history, will warrant us in fully