During the more than seven weeks between Colonel Burr’s commitment and the convening of the court on May 22, time was hanging heavy on the hands of the principals. It was not surprising that Mr. Wickham should have seized the opportunity to give a lawyer dinner and to introduce his distinguished client to this delightful local custom. No one enjoyed a lawyer dinner more than the Chief Justice, whose wit and good humor made him a welcome guest. His house was within a stone’s throw of Mr. Wickham’s. He and the Chief Justice were good friends as well as neighbors and the Chief Justice had often been a guest of Mr. Wickham. What then was more natural than that Mr. Wickham should extend an invitation to Judge Marshall? Judge Marshall accepted the invitation and attended the dinner. What none of them seems to have grasped was the obvious impropriety of the judge who was to preside at the trial appearing as a guest at a dinner given by the leading lawyer for the defense at which the defendant also was a guest! The significance of the incident, however, was not lost on Editor Ritchie. The story of the dinner was soon public property. There appears to have been no attempt to conceal it. So for the issue of _The Enquirer_ of Friday morning, April 10, Mr. Ritchie did not have to rack his brains to find an idea suitable for his acid pen. This issue contained an article signed “A Stranger from the Country.” It did not require a gift of clairvoyance to perceive that the “Stranger” was none other than Mr. Ritchie himself. Said the Stranger: “In the _Argus_ of the 7th it is stated, and the fact is now too notorious to be doubted, that the Chief Justice has dined with Aaron Burr at Mr. Wickham’s, since he himself solemnly decided that there was probable cause to believe Burr guilty of a high misdemeanor against his country.” The editor first directed his attack at Mr. Wickham. He alluded to the old charge of Mr. Wickham having been a Tory in the Revolutionary War, indifferent to the fact that the same charge had been made against his own father. The people of Virginia, observed Mr. Ritchie, had generously forgiven that error of his youth. But Mr. Wickham “should modestly have refrained from recalling it to our recollection by entertaining a suspected traitor to the Union as his guest, a report so defamatory to his own fame.” Having thus disposed of Mr. Wickham, the editor dipped his quill in acid and set to work on Judge Marshall. “I have never,” he confessed, “had any the least confidence in the political principles of the Chief Justice. I have never discovered in his public (for I am ignorant of his private) character, any of that noble candor which his friends have made the theme of such extravagant eulogium. I cannot discern in him, for my soul, those splendid and even Godlike talents, which many of all parties ascribe to him, his book certainly displays none such.” The allusion was to Judge Marshall’s recently published _Life of Washington_.