1839," and "3d April 1840." Oxford said he had intended to destroy these papers in the morning, before he went out, but had forgotten it. All these papers--the "rules" and letters--were sworn by Oxford's mother to be _in his own handwriting_; and it should have been mentioned that there was not a tittle of evidence adduced to show that there were, in fact, any such society in existence, or any such persons as these papers would have indicated; nor, up to the present moment, has there been the least reason for believing that such was the case. Thus closed the case for the Crown, undoubtedly a very formidable one. No attempt was made by the prisoner's counsel--who appear to have conducted the defence temperately and judiciously--to alter by evidence the position of the proved facts; which, therefore, were allowed to stand before the jury as almost conclusively establishing the case of high treason. Mr Taylor, however, strongly impaired the Attorney-general's notion that there had been in the pistols balls, which had gone over the wall; because his own witnesses had spoken decisively to the bullet-marks on the wall; yet no flattened balls had been produced, after all the search that had been made. Mr Taylor, therefore, inferred that the pistols had contained powder only: "a great outrage, unquestionably, but still not the _treason_ charged." There was, again, he contended, there could have been, no _motive_ for killing the Queen; and the idea of the Treasonable Society was mere moonshine--a pure invention concocted by a lunatic--one who had inherited insanity, and himself exhibited the proofs of its existence: for Mr Taylor undertook to prove the insanity of Oxford's grandfather, his father, and himself. The proof broke down as far as concerned the grandfather, a sailor in the navy; for it was clear that his alleged violent eccentricities had been exhibited when he was under the influence of liquor. The insanity of Oxford's father was sought to be established by his widow, the mother of the prisoner. If her story, "told with unfaltering voice and unshaken nerve," were correct, her husband had undoubtedly been a very violent and brutal fellow, with a dash of madness in his composition. It is possible that the mother, in her anxiety to save her son from a traitor's death on the scaffold, had, by a _quasi pia fraus_, too highly coloured her deceased husband's conduct. If this were not so, she had indeed been an object of the utmost sympathy. He forced her to marry him, she said, by furious threats of self-destruction if she did not: he burnt a great roll of banknotes to ashes in her presence, because she had refused, or hesitated, to become his wife. He used to terrify her, during her pregnancies, by hideous grimaces, and apish tricks and gesticulations: the results being that her second child was born, and within three years' time died, an idiot. Her husband pursued the same course during