persons brought forward from the middle ranks of society into the very
van of political distinction and influence, on the other hand, in the
sympathy and favor extended by the Court to the practical assertor of
despotic principles, we trace the prevalence of that feeling, which,
since the commencement of the late King's reign, has made the Throne the
rallying point of all that are unfriendly to the cause of freedom. Again,
in considering the conduct of the Crown Lawyers during the Trial--the
narrow and irrational rules of evidence which they sought to
establish--the unconstitutional control assumed by the Judges, over the
decisions of the tribunal before which the cause was tried, and the
refusal to communicate the reasons upon which those decisions were
founded--above all, too, the legal opinions expressed on the great
question relative to the abatement of an Impeachment by Dissolution, in
which almost the whole body of lawyers [Footnote: Among the rest, Lord
Erskine, who allowed his profession, on this occasion, to stand in the
light of his judgment. "As to a Nisi-prius lawyer (said Burke) giving an
opinion on the duration of an Impeachment--as well might a rabbit, that
breeds six times a year, pretend to know any thing of the gestation of an
elephant."] took the wrong, the pedantic, and the unstatesmanlike side of
the question,--while in all these indications of the spirit of that
profession, and of its propensity to tie down the giant Truth, with its
small threads of technicality and precedent, we perceive the danger to be
apprehended from the interference of such a spirit in politics, on the
other side, arrayed against these petty tactics of the Forum, we see the
broad banner of Constitutional Law, upheld alike by a Fox and a Pitt, a
Sheridan and a Dundas, and find truth and good sense taking refuge from
the equivocations of lawyers, in such consoling documents as the Report
upon the Abuses of the Trial by Burke--a document which, if ever a reform
of the English law should be attempted, will stand as a great guiding
light to the adventurers in that heroic enterprise.