They all slept in one room. Having strangled two, he left the room; but, after meditating for some time, came to the conclusion that he might as well be hanged for killing all four; on which he returned, and strangled the other two--having shaken hands with them before he did it! He then quitted the house, and went to a neighbour's, to whom he did not mention what he had done; but on being apprehended the next day, and taken before the coroner, he confessed the above facts. No witness had ever observed a trace of insanity about him. The physician to a lunatic asylum offered to prove that the prisoner's grandmother and sister had been under his care, the latter for entertaining a desire to destroy herself and her children--evidence which the judge rejected; and under his direction the jury convicted, and he passed sentence of death on the prisoner.[4] In the year 1845, a young servant girl, quiet and docile, having taken a knife from the kitchen, on some trivial pretence, went up to the room where her master's child lay, and killed it. She then went downstairs, and told the horrifying fact to her master. She was quite conscious of the crime she had committed, and showed much anxiety to know whether she would be hanged or transported. There was not the slightest tittle of evidence that she had been labouring under any delusion; yet she was acquitted on the ground of insanity![5] Can anything be more grievously unsatisfactory than such a state of things as this, in the administration of the criminal justice of the country? One of the causes which conduced to such results was the too ready deference paid to speculative medical men, professing to have made disordered intellects their peculiar study, and who came forward, from time to time, confidently and authoritatively pronouncing that such and such circumstances indicated unequivocally the existence of "insanity," of "moral insanity," at the time of the act committed. Nay, they would sit in court, listening to a detail of facts, from which they would then enter the witness-box, and authoritatively declare their opinion that, if such were the facts, the prisoner was _insane_, and therefore irresponsible, when the act in question was committed! Many held that the mere absence of assignable motive indicated such insanity! and many, that the mere committal of the particular act should be so regarded! Notions more dangerous and monstrous cannot be conceived. Well might the late Mr. Baron Gurney declare, "that the defence of insanity had lately grown to a fearful height, and the security of the public required that it should be watched."[6] There are two Trials contained in Mr Townsend's first volume, which afford memorable illustrations of the difficulty with which these questions are encountered in our courts of justice. They are those of Oxford, for shooting at the Queen, and of M'Naughten for the murder of Mr Drummond, the private secretary of the late Sir Robert Peel.