The Stranger continued: “But I have always been informed, and until now have believed, that he was a man of excellent judgment, most consummate prudence, and of a deportment highly decorous and dignified. I took his merits upon trust and bountifully gave him credit for good qualities I find he does not possess.” Mr. Ritchie now shook an accusing finger at Judge Marshall. “Let me inform the conscience of the Chief Justice that the public do not view his dining with Burr as a circumstance as trivial as he himself may incline to consider it.... We regard such conduct as a willful prostration of the dignity of his own character, and a wanton insult he might have spared his country.” The writer then asked several questions that were on the tongues of many Richmonders and which for years after the event were to provide a subject for popular speculation. “I have searched in vain in my own mind for some apology for conduct so grossly indecent.... Was the Chief Justice ignorant that Burr was to be of the party to which Wickham invited him? If so, what are we to think of Mr. Wickham’s delicacy toward his friend? If so, why did not the judge leave the house as soon as he discovered the indignity imposed upon him?” Then came the peroration: “Has the Chief Justice forgotten or neglected the maxim which is on the mouth of every tyro of the law--that _the administrator of justice should not only be pure but unsuspected_?” The editor was not yet through with the Chief Justice. The incident continued to be “news” around the city, for in the issue of _The Enquirer_ of Tuesday, April 28, Ritchie returned to the subject. This time his comments were contained in a column headed “Extract from a letter written by a resident of Richmond Hill to his friend in the country.” The Resident said he had been informed that Judge Marshall had been apprised of the invitation to Colonel Burr. But, commented the Resident, that could not have deprived him of his faculty of locomotion “unless he had been touched by the transforming wand of Circe.” Richmond was full of witty classicists. The reference to Circe’s wand, which turned men into swine, and its application to the magical effect of Mr. Wickham’s dinner on the Chief Justice could not have been lost on them. “But,” continued the Resident of Richmond Hill, “perhaps the imagination of the judge was stronger than his appetite, and he had not fortitude enough to tear himself away from the prospect before him. In this the judge must pardon me if I am reminded of one of Goldsmith’s dishes of tongue with a small garnish of brains. Many judges have been condemned for the errors of the heart and the head, but I hope, dear F., that the list is not enlarged by errors of the appetite.” At that point Editor Ritchie brought his torment to a close. As for the Chief Justice, he no doubt thought much, but he said not a word.