It is in vain for the judge, let him be ever so rigid in his charge, to tell them that their province is simply with certain facts, on which they have to pronounce an opinion of yea or nay. They must be jurymen, and “something more.” It's not every day Mr. Sniggins, of Pimlico, is called upon to keep company with a chief-justice and sergeant learned in the law--Popkins don't leave his shop once a week to discuss Coke upon Littleton with an attorney-general. No: the event to them is a great one--there they sit, fawned on, and flattered by counsel on both sides--called impartial and intelligent, and all that--and while every impertinence the law encourages has been bandied about the body of the court, _they_ remain to be lauded and praised by all parties, for they have a verdict in their power, and when it comes--what a thing it is! There is a well-known story of an English nobleman, desiring to remain _incog_. in Calais, telling his negro servant--“If any one ask who I am, Sambo, mind you say, 'a Frenchman.'” Sambo carried out the instruction by saying--“My massa a Frenchman, and so am I.” This anecdote exactly exemplifies a verdict of a jury--it cannot stop short at sense, but must, by one fatal plunge, involve its decision in absurdity. Hear what lately happened in the north of Ireland. A man was tried and found guilty of murder--the case admitted no doubt--the act was a cold-blooded, deliberate assassination, committed by a soldier on his sergeant, in the presence of many witnesses. The trial proceeded; the facts were proved; and--I quote the local newspaper-- “The jury retired, and were shut up when the judge left the court, at half-past seven. At nine, his lordship returned to court, when the foreman of the jury intimated that they had agreed. They were then called into court, and having answered to their names, returned a verdict of guilty, but recommended the prisoner to mercy upon account of the close intimacy that existed between the parties at the time of the occurrence.” Now, what ever equalled this? When the jury who tried Madame Laffarge for the murder of her husband, returned a verdict of guilty, with that recommendation to mercy which is implied by the words “des circumstances atténuantes,” Alphonse Karr pronounced the “extenuating circumstances,” to be the fact, that she always mixed gum with the arsenic, and never gave him his poison “neat.” But even _they_ never thought of carrying out their humanity farther by employing the Belfast plea, that she had been “intimate with him” before she killed him. No, it was reserved for our canny northerns to find out this new secret of criminal jurisprudence, and to show the world that there is a deep philosophy in the vulgar expression, a blood relation--meaning thereby that degree of allianceship which admits of butchery, and makes killing no murder; for if intimacy be a ground of mercy, what must be friendship, what brotherhood, or paternity?