And here let me for a moment glance at Serjeant SHEE’S speech. Observe this Old Bailey advocate is well aware of that most unfair rule of law, which prohibits every person, and the wife of every person, who stands as a defendant at a criminal bar, from giving evidence. He well knew the discreditable defects in our criminal jurisprudence, and yet felt no compunction in doing his best to blacken the character of a clergyman who is not of Rome. Let me tell this Q.C., who delights in desperate eases, that as a member of that church which condemns priests to celibacy, and consecrates the revelations of the confessional, [that confessional, which thirty-three inexperienced Italian girls have lately exemplified the use of,] he should have paused ere flinging dirt at priests of a purer faith. The sentence of the Criminal Court of Turin on Don Gurlino, an unparalleled villain, Curate of the Church of St. Carlo, was ringing in his ears, when Serjeant Shee deemed it an honourable discharge of his duty to try and crush an innocent man, and load the Ministry of the English Church with undeserved censure. Let me tell Serjeant Shee he made a sufficiently bad appearance in the case of Palmer, the Poisoner, and if his Church so instructs him, he is badly advised. Let me remind him that his countryman, Charles Phillips, as Counsel for Courvoisier, was disgraced for solemnly avowing his “conscientious belief,” in the innocence of a wretch who had confessed his crime to him! Nor in reviewing a case in which sound jurisprudence and common sense have been so scandalously violated, a case in which the most ignorant and illiterate jurymen, some scarcely able to read, and unacquainted with the laws of evidence, are called upon to pronounce judgment, the case of an unoffending man rigorously punished, condemned without proof, by the bare word, without one corroborating circumstance, of a precocious girl, who not yet in her teens, is mature and ripe enough in artifice and feminine subtilty, illustrating what depths of duplicity exhibit themselves in children who are carefully trained up in the way they should NOT go. I am anxious to “improve the occasion” by criticizing the BISHOP OF WINCHESTER’S share in this cruel prosecution. If the multitude bear false witness against their neighbour with thoughtless levity, it is not becoming in a right reverend Prelate to play with the fire of calumny, or lend his ear to suspicion, quite void of reason, as if “good name in man or woman were NOT the immediate jewel of the soul.” Of what use is a Bishop, with a Princely stipend, and a Lordly Castle, if he cannot personally investigate the truth of a serious charge against a “reverend friend and Brother?” Why condemn without a hearing? Why this eager credulity of clerical evil without some examination of the evidence? Why assume guilt? Why this hot haste to consign Mr. Hatch to his ignominious fate, the uncertainties of a most defective jurisprudence? Churchmen