He was apprehended on the night of Friday the 18th of February, 1825, and conveyed to Bow-street office, on a charge of stealing a horse, the property of a man named Meredith, a miller, living near Ruarden in Gloucestershire. It appeared that the guilty wretch, after his discharge from Hertford jail, where he had been confined as an approver in order that his evidence might be secured at the trial of his companions in crime, wandered through the country without an object or a name, and followed by public execration. Reduced to the most abject state of misery, he at length found an asylum in the house of his aged mother at Ruarden. Meredith, the miller, was distantly related to him by marriage; and while paying him a visit, the unprincipled villain having seen and admired a mare which was in his possession, marked it for his own. Seizing a favourable opportunity, he carried the animal off with him to London, and there he disposed of her for 20_l._, having assumed a fictitious name. He was, however, traced by the miller, and at length on the 18th February was taken into custody. For this offence he was put on his trial at the Old Bailey on the 7th of the following month of April, and the evidence for the prosecution, which was clear and conclusive, having been gone into, the prisoner read the following defence from a written paper:-- "My lord and gentlemen of the jury,--If I have this day pleaded not guilty to the indictment preferred against me, it is not that I wish by subtleties to evade, or screen myself from the verdict and sentence which my country may award against me, but that I may have an opportunity to say something in this court, to evince to the public, that whatever may have been the unhappy circumstances of the latter days of my life, I was not driven into my present crime from depravity of disposition, but from a species of fatal necessity, which had placed me far beyond the reach of all human assistance and charity. The appeal I now make is not with a view to lessen my past error that I unfortunately fell into, as there is a God on whom I alone rely for mercy; but I do beg of the jury to banish all former unfortunate circumstances from their minds. It cannot have escaped your notice, that immediately after and ever since my discharge from Hertford, the public animosity has been kept alive against me by the public press, which has reached every part of England. Wherever I went, even to the remotest village throughout the kingdom, I was spurned as an outcast of society; and the chief instrument which prevented my obtaining employment, or indeed effecting a reformation, was the public press, which has not slackened to follow me, and portray me to the world. As the victim of prejudice, I could scarcely move from one place to another without seeing myself noticed in the daily papers. Those of my former friends, who might otherwise have wished to continue their services towards me, shrunk back from an