“I have hardly a need, gentlemen, to reveal to you the sequel of this painful story. As all the world remembers, you had in the end to submit to the inevitable. You, gentlemen of the jury, consented to a verdict of guilty; a month later the unhappy man was hanged; and he had not been five days in his grave when a nephew of the murdered woman gave himself up to a justice that had already wreaked itself on an innocent man, and confessed that he himself had murdered his aunt because he was in need of her money. “These facts are green in the minds of you all. But there is a coincidence connected with this atrocious story and this grievous case which is engaging your attention. The counsel for the prosecution in both cases is identical. He stands before you framing yet another of those objections with which he has endeavored to impede the cause of humanity. I point my finger at him, and challenge him to deny the truth of the statement I am making. And by a perfectly logical and natural extension of this coincidence, the judge who sent the butler to his doom is seated above you now in all the panoply of his office. I leave him now if he is able to deal in a like manner with this poor Magdalene, who may or may not have fallen by the way.” Northcote sat down after having spoken for nearly three hours. The December darkness had long fallen upon the court. The feeble gas-jets seemed to enhance the shadows that they cast. The intense faces of the overcrowded building, bar, jury, populace all electrified, seemed to belong to so many ghosts, so pale, shining, and transfigured did they gleam. For nearly three hours had the advocate cast his spell; yet moment by moment, in the dominion of his voice and the cumulation of his effects, he had increased the hold upon his hearers. At times the tension had been so great that it had seemed that somebody must break it with a laugh; but no one had done so. One and all were swept forward by the contained impetuosity of the orator; by the restrained and gentle modulations of a power that played through every word he used; by a ferocious irony which looked like tenderness, so little did they understand its nature; and above all by the irresistible magnetism of a personal genius which rendered the most perilous obstacles of no account.