The speech itself will be found to be characteristic of O’Connell. The bitter fountains of invective, the _sæva indignatio_ of a just cause, keen and subtle irony, great facility of phrase and ornament, denunciation, defiance, and then a sudden modulation into an almost fawning fairness of tone--all are here. It is a plea not over-logical in arrangement; often desultory in the show passages; and, from the nature of the case, often legal in reference. But shorn, not only from considerations of space, of certain eccentricities and excursions, it is hoped that it will leave a definite picture of a great rhetorical orator, and of the two jewels of his style,--virile emphasis and impassioned intensity. I consented to the adjournment yesterday, gentlemen of the jury, from that impulse of nature which compels us to postpone pain; it is, indeed, painful to me to address you; it is a cheerless, a hopeless task to address you--a task which would require all the animation and interest to be derived from the working of a mind fully fraught with the resentment and disgust created in mine yesterday, by that farrago of helpless absurdity with which Mr. Attorney-General regaled you.[1] But I am now not sorry for the delay. Whatever I may have lost in vivacity, I trust I shall compensate for in discretion. That which yesterday excited my anger, now appears to me to be an object of pity; and that which then roused my indignation, now only moves to _contempt_. I can now address you with feelings softened, and, I trust, subdued; and I do, from my soul, declare, that I now cherish no other sensations than those which enable me to bestow on the Attorney-General, and on his discourse, pure and unmixed compassion. It was a discourse in which you could not discover either order, or method, or eloquence; it contained very little logic, and no poetry at all; violent and virulent, it was a confused and disjointed tissue of bigotry, amalgamated with congenial vulgarity. He accused my client of using Billingsgate, and he accused him of it in language suited exclusively for that meridian. He descended even to the calling of names: he called this young gentleman a “malefactor,” a “Jacobin,” and a “ruffian,” gentlemen of the jury; he called him “abominable,” and “seditious,” and “revolutionary,” and “infamous,” and a “ruffian” again, gentlemen of the jury; he called him a “brothel keeper,” a “pander,” “a kind of bawd in breeches,” and a “ruffian” a third time, gentlemen of the jury.