If Baron Hotham really uttered this drivel, he was totally unfit to administer justice, and should have been removed from the Bench. Mr Townsend, in one place, observes that Baron Hotham "must have allowed his kindly feelings to master his judgment;" and in another cites the case as "a very _famous_ one, being the first of those occasions on which judges admitted, from the bench, the necessity and expediency of juries tempering the law, where, by a stern necessity, they have held themselves bound by it;" that is, in plain English, where judges advised juries to violate their oaths, in order to defeat the just administration of the law. We know no parallel to this "famous" case, except that of Justice Fletcher, a judge in Ireland, in the year 1812; who--as we learn from Mr Phillips' very interesting _Memoirs of Curran_, about to issue from the press--thus addressed an Irish jury, in a trial for murder occasioned in a duel: "Gentlemen, it is my business to lay down the law to you, and I shall do so. Where two people go out to fight a duel, and one of them falls, the law says it is murder. And I tell you, by law it _is_ murder; but, at the same time, _a fairer duel I never heard of in the whole coorse_ [_sic_] _of my life_!" The prisoners were, of course, immediately acquitted. Mr Townsend states, that "the long series of judicial annals has not been darkened by a single conviction for murder, in the case of a duel fairly fought."[43] If this be a correct statement, which we greatly doubt, it argues either a signal deficiency of evidence in every case, or a perverse disregard of duty by either judges or juries, or both. We repeat it, and do so anxiously desirous of giving every degree of publicity in our power to the fact, that our judges discharge their duties on these occasions with unwavering firmness. We shall give two or three modern and interesting instances. The late eminent Mr Justice Buller tried a clergyman--the Reverend Bennet Allen,(!)[44] and his second, for killing a Mr Dulany, in a duel fought at ten o'clock at night, in Hyde Park, at the distance of eight yards: the reverend duellist had put on his spectacles, in order to see his man. Mr Justice Buller told the jury that "they were bound to adhere to the law, as to which there never," he continued, "has been a doubt. In the case of a deliberate duel, if one person be killed, it is murder in the person killing him. Of that proposition of law there is not, there never has been, the smallest doubt. Sitting here, it is my duty to tell you what the law is, which I have done in explicit terms; and we must not suffer it to be frittered away, by any false or fantastical notions of honour." Here the judge did his duty: but the jury seem, according to Mr Townsend, who doubtless spoke after having duly examined the facts of the case, "to have temporised between their consciences and wishes, by acquitting the second, and finding the principal guilty of manslaughter."