The witnesses for the prosecution established a case, if unanswered, of perfect guilt; the facts of the assassination were indisputable, and the evidence of the prisoner's sanity cogent in the extreme. Mr Cockburn addressed the jury at very great length, and in a strain of sustained eloquence and power, his object being to persuade the jury "that the prisoner was labouring, at the time of committing the act, under a morbid[?] insanity, which took away from him all power of self-control, so that he was not responsible for his acts. I do not put this case forward as one of total insanity; it is a case of delusion, and I say so from sources upon which the light of science has thrown her holy beam." Those who have read what has gone before concerning Oxford's case will appreciate this observation of Mr Cockburn, and gather from it his adoption, for the purpose of that defence, of the theory of moral insanity, which he enforced and illustrated by many striking and brilliant observations, calculated to produce a deep and strong impression on the minds of the jury, such as required the utmost exertions of Sir William Follett in reply, and finally of judicial exposition to efface, if fallacious--or modify to any extent rendered necessary by inaccuracy or exaggeration. Ten witnesses, all of them from Glasgow, were called, for the purpose of establishing the fact that the prisoner had, for some eighteen months previously to January 1843, appeared to labour, and had continually represented himself as labouring, under a persuasion that he was the victim of some such indefinite, mysterious, and incessant persecution as he spoke of in his statement before the magistrate at Bow Street. We are bound to say that the force of this testimony--coming chiefly from persons above all suspicion, and in a superior rank of life--is irresistible as to the existence of such an insane delusion down to the time of his quitting Glasgow. Not a witness, however, gave evidence of his exhibiting that tendency after his last return to London, before his shooting Mr Drummond. The only mention of Sir Robert Peel's name was by one of these ten witnesses, a former fellow-lodger of the prisoner's, who told him, in July 1842, that he had heard Sir Robert Peel speak in the House of Commons; preferred his speaking to that of Lord John Russell and Mr O'Connell; and said "he thought Sir R. Peel had arrived at what Lord Byron said of him--that 'he would be something great in the state.'" Mr Cockburn asked the witness, "Did you ever, on that or any other occasion, hear him speak at all disrespectfully of Sir Robert Peel?" _Answer._--"Certainly not." One or two witnesses spoke to singularities of demeanour as early as the years 1835 and 1836. One of his landlords, in the former year, got rid of him as a lodger, "for one reason, in consequence of the infidel doctrines he maintained, and the books of such a character which he was in the habit of reading." One witness,