eloquently that the judge was evidently affected, and the ladies present at the trial were even moved to tears. Tried again at the Spring Assizes on the charge of sedition, he cross-examined the witnesses from Monday to Saturday at noon, and then proceeded to sum up his defence in a speech which altogether (Sunday intervening) lasted ten hours. "I do not think," he remarks, "I ever spoke so powerfully in my life as during the last hour of that defence. The peroration, the Stafford papers said, would never be forgotten; and I remember as I sat down, panting for breath and utterly exhausted, how Talfourd and Erskine and the jury sat transfixed, gazing at me in silence, and the whole crowded place was breathless, as it seemed, for a minute." The case being removed by a "writ of _certiorari_" to the Court of Queen's Bench, was tried on the 5th of May, 1843. In his defence Thomas Cooper again delivered an eloquent speech, five and a half hours long, and was again acquitted of the charge of felony. Judge Erskine's notes of the trial had "_mistake_" written alongside the evidence on that part of the charge. But the eloquent Chartist orator was convicted on the charge of _sedition_ and _conspiracy_, and sent to Stafford jail for two years. There are few chapters in the Autobiography so full of interest and so graphically written as those which describe Thomas Cooper's prison experience. Galled to the quick by the treatment he received--for he was kept on low, miserable fare and denied "literary privileges"--he determined to break down "the system of restraint in Stafford jail, and win the privilege of reading and writing, or die in the attempt." After many manoeuvres he managed to get pen, ink, and paper, and write a petition to the House of Commons, which was handed in at the bar of the House by Mr. Duncombe, M.P. for Finsbury. All that he could reasonably expect was now granted in answer to his appeal, and the remainder of his time was filled up with literary work. He revelled in the English poets from Shakespeare to Shelley; read again the "Decline and Fall," Prideaux's "Connexion," White's "Selborne," etc., etc.; fell passionately in love with the study of Hebrew, and almost raved about the glories of the sacred language of the Old Testament; and read two thirds of the Hebrew Bible, copying out verbs and nouns as he went along. One day he was visited by Lord Sandon, afterward Earl of Harrowby, who fell into conversation with the learned prisoner about the poetical books of the Bible in the old German edition which lay open before him on the table. A short time before his release the chaplain told him that the way was open for him to go to Cambridge if he would; but the conditions were such as did not suit the independent mind of the political martyr. Cooper had a shrewd suspicion that the visit of the nobleman had some connection with this generous offer.