Nothing is more awful than the trial of a British Peer; yet, the mean appearance of the prisoner, and the vulgar awkwardness of the Chief Judge, made the present trial as little imposing as possible. The Earl’s behaviour conciliated no favour to him: it was somewhat sullen, and his defence contemptible, endeavouring to protract the time, though without address. At length he pleaded madness--unwillingly, but in compliance with the entreaties of his family. The audience was touched at the appearance of his two brothers, reduced to depose to the lunacy in their blood. But those impressions were effaced, and gave way to horror, when it appeared to the Court that the Earl had gloried in his shocking deed. Being easily convicted, he begged pardon of his Judges for having used the plea of madness. But if his life was odious, and during his life his cowardice notorious, he showed at his death that he did not want sense, resolution, or temper. He bore the ignominy of his fate like a philosopher, and went to meet it with the ease of a gentleman. In the tedious passage of his conveyance from the Tower to Tyburn, which was impeded by the crowds that assembled round his coach, he dropped not a rash word, nor one that had not sense and thought in it. Little was wanting to grace his catastrophe but less resentment to his wife, the peculiarity of being executed in his wedding habit too strongly marking that he imputed his calamity to that source. His relation, Lady Huntingdon, the Metropolitan of the Methodists, had laboured much in his last hours to profit of his fears for the honour of her sect; but, having renounced the plea of madness, he did not choose to resign his intellects to folly. So impudent, however, were those knavish zealots, that one Loyd, a Methodist, having been robbed by his coachman, a Methodist too, Whitfield appeared at the trial before the Lord Mayor, and read an excommunication that he had pronounced against the coachman. They would have accepted a murderer, if a proselyte from the Established Church; and flattered themselves that they could shake off the infamy of a house-breaker by casting him out from their own--so brief and effectual do enthusiasts hold their own legerdemain.