It is one of the gravest inconveniences which accompany the liberty of free discussion that an accused man is put upon his trial before the bar of public opinion, and his guilt or innocence pronounced upon, long before he takes his place in presence of his real judges; and although, in the main, popular opinion is rarely wrong, still there are moments of rash enthusiasm, periods of misguided zeal or unbridled bigotry, in which such decisions are highly perilous. Too frequently, also, will circumstances quite foreign to the matter at issue be found to influence the opinions expressed upon it. So far had the popular verdict gone against the accused in the present case that there was a considerable time spent on the morning of the trial, before a jury could be empanelled which should not include any one who had already pronounced strongly on the case. Curtis, as I have mentioned, declined all means of defence; he thought, or affected to think, that every member of the bar was open to Government corruption, and that as the whole was an organized plot for his destruction, resistance was perfectly vain and useless. When asked, therefore, to whom he had intrusted his case, he advanced to the front of the dock, and said: “Gentlemen of the jury, the disagreeable duties you are sworn to discharge shall not be protracted by anything on my part. Whatever falsehoods the counsel for the Crown may advance, and the witnesses swear to, shall meet neither denial nor refutation from me. The Castle scoundrels shall play the whole game themselves, and whenever you agree 'what 's to pay,' I 'll settle the score without flinching.” This extraordinary address, uttered in a tone of half-savage jocularity, excited a strange mixture of emotion in those who heard it, which ultimately ended in half-subdued laughter throughout the court, repressing which at once, the judge gravely reprimanded the prisoner for the aspersions he had thrown on the administration of justice, and appointed one of the most distinguished members of the bar to conduct his defence. It was late in the day when the Crown counsel rose to open his case. His address was calm and dispassionate. It was divested of what might seem to be any ungenerous allusion to the peculiar character or temperament of the accused, but it promised an amount of circumstantial evidence which, were the credit of the witnesses to stand unimpeached, would be almost impossible to reconcile with anything short of the guilt of the prisoner in the dock.