The next important event is the trial of the Hunts for a libel in _The Examiner_ in 1811. Brougham was their counsel, and made a masterly defence; and, though Lord Ellenborough, the presiding judge, summed up dead against the defendants--the judges always appear to have done so--the jury acquitted them. Yet Brougham in the course of his address drew the following unfavorable picture of the then state of the press: 'The licentiousness of the press has reached to a height which it certainly never attained in any other country, nor even in this at any former period. That licentiousness has indeed of late years appeared to despise all the bounds which had once been prescribed to the attacks on private character, insomuch that there is not only no personage so important or exalted--for of that I do not complain--but no person so humble, harmless, and retired as to escape the defamation which is daily and hourly poured forth by the venal crew to gratify the idle curiosity or still less excusable malignity of the public. To mark out for the indulgence of that propensity individuals retiring into the privacy of domestic life--to hunt them down and drag them forth as a laughing stock to the vulgar, has become in our days with some men the road even to popularity, but with multitudes the means of earning a base subsistence.' Soon after this trial and another provincial one connected with the same 'libel'--one gets quite sick of the word--in which the defendants were found guilty in spite of Brougham's exertions in their behalf and the previous verdict of the London jury in the case of the Hunts, a debate arose in the House of Commons on the subject of _ex-officio_ informations generally, and especially with regard to their applicability to the case of newspapers. In the course of this debate Lord Folkestone charged the Government with partiality in their prosecutions, and said: 'It appears that the real rule which guides these prosecutions is this: that _The Courier_ and the other papers which support the ministry of the day, may say whatever they please without the fear of prosecution, whereas _The Examiner_, _The Independent Whig_, _The Statesman_, and papers that take the contrary line, are sure to be prosecuted for any expression that may be offensive to the minister'--an accusation which was decidedly true. In 1812 the Hunts were again prosecuted for a libel upon the Prince Regent, and sentenced to be imprisoned two years, and to pay a fine of £500. Bat the imprisonment was alleviated in every possible way, as we gather from Leigh Hunt's charming description of his prison in his Autobiography.