Paul Clifford — Volume 07Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
General
Paul Clifford — Volume 07
Lytton, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Baron
Brigands and robbers -- Fiction
observed, as the jury were sworn, to look steadily in the face of each.
He breathed thick and hard when the various aliases he had assumed--
Howard, Cavendish, Jackson, etc.,--were read; but smiled with an
unaccountable expression when the list was completed, as if exulting at
the varieties of his ingenuity. At twenty-five minutes past ten Mr.
Dyebright, the counsel for the crown, stated the case to the jury."
Mr. Dyebright was a lawyer of great eminence; he had been a Whig all his
life, but had latterly become remarkable for his insincerity, and
subservience to the wishes of the higher powers. His talents were
peculiar and effective. If he had little eloquence, he had much power;
and his legal knowledge, was sound and extensive. Many of his brethren
excelled him in display; but no one, like him, possessed the secret of
addressing a jury. Winningly familiar; seemingly candid to a degree that
scarcely did justice to his cause, as if he were in an agony lest he
should persuade you to lean a hair-breadth more on his side of the case
than justice would allow; apparently all made up of good, homely,
virtuous feeling, a disinterested regard for truth, a blunt yet tender
honesty, seasoned with a few amiable fireside prejudices, which always
come home to the hearts of your fathers of families and thorough-bred
Britons; versed in all the niceties of language, and the magic of names;
if he were defending crime, carefully calling it misfortune; if attacking
misfortune, constantly calling it crime,--Mr. Dyebright was exactly the
man born to pervert justice, to tickle jurors, to cozen truth with a
friendly smile, and to obtain a vast reputation as an excellent advocate.
He began with a long preliminary flourish on the importance of the case.
He said that he should with the most scrupulous delicacy avoid every
remark calculated to raise unnecessary prejudice against the prisoner.
He should not allude to his unhappy notoriety, his associations with the
lowest dregs. (Here up jumped the counsel for the prisoner, and Mr.
Dyebright was called to order.) "God knows," resumed the learned
gentleman, looking wistfully at the jury, "that my learned friend might
have spared himself this warning. God knows that I would rather fifty of
the wretched inmates of this county jail were to escape unharmed than
that a hair of the prisoner you behold at the bar should be unjustly
touched. The life of a human being is at stake; we should be guilty
ourselves of a crime which on our deathbeds we should tremble to recall,
were we to suffer any consideration, whether of interest or of prejudice,
or of undue fear for our own properties and lives, to bias us even to the
turning of a straw against the unfortunate prisoner. Gentlemen, if you
find me travelling a single inch from my case,--if you find me saying a
single word calculated to harm the prisoner in your eyes, and unsupported
by the evidence I shall call,--then I implore you not to depend upon the
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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