Now if there be one principle of law better settled than another (and probably it was as clearly set forth in the Revised Statutes of Venice as is set forth in our own common law), it is that a party entitled to the possession of a commodity, whether grain, guano, dead or live men's flesh, bones and sinews, is entitled, also, to pursue the usual necessary and appropriate means of obtaining the possession of the same. I appeal to Colonel W---- if this be not good law, and asking whether, if he be entitled to a dinner, he has not a right to seize upon it, whenever or however he can find it; whether, if a man owes him a bottle of champagne, he has not the right to break the neck of the bottle if a corkscrew is not convenient? So, to use a drier example, the sale of standing timber entitles the purchaser to enter the land upon which it is situated, and to cut down and carry off his own property. On the same principle, if A sells B a house and lot, entirely surrounded by other land owned by A, B has clearly a right of way to his own wife and fireside over A's land. (2 Blackstone 1149.) A hundred examples might be given in point, but it would be insulting the dignity of this court to argue at length a theory so transparently clear. If the shedding of a few drops of blood, more or less, was incidental and necessary to the rights of the plaintiff, if the article of personal property, forfeited to him on the bond, could be obtained in no other way, then, according to all the principles of law and common sense, he _had_ a right to spill those drops, more or less; and that, too, without legal risk. If the penalty was legal, and that were admitted, the method of exacting it was legal also. Portia's quibble was so transparent and barefaced that the decision of the court can only be explained on the theory that the court was drunk, or in love, which seems to have been the condition of several of the prominent parties in this proceeding, excepting always the plaintiff. As to the other part of Portia's plea, it is doubtless true that the plaintiff would take more of the commodity involved in the suit than the court awarded him at his peril; but as half a pound, or a quarter of a pound, cut off from the right spot would have answered his purpose, I do not see under what principle of law he was defrauded of that satisfaction. There was nothing to have prevented him from cutting less than a pound from Antonio's body, and of so releasing him, the defendant, from a portion of the penalty; and the court should have instructed the plaintiff as to his rights in this particular, instead of adopting a quibble worthy of only a Tombs lawyer or a third-rate pettifogger.