The news was received with a sense of relief in Ireland, where the wholesale recklessness of the swearing, and the transparent falseness of the verdict had, from the first, created intense indignation and resentment. Everyone knew and saw that, whatever might have been the participation of those men in the rescue of Colonel Kelly, they had not had a fair trial; nay, that their so-called trial was an outrage on all law and justice; that witnesses, jurors and judges, were in the full fierce heat of excitement, panic, and passion--much more ready to swear evidence, to find verdicts, and to pass sentences against innocent men than they themselves were, perhaps, conscious of while labouring under such influences. The public and official recognition of the falseness and injustice of the Manchester verdict was therefore hailed with intense satisfaction. Maguire was at once liberated; Allen, Larkin, Shore, and O'Brien were still detained in custody. It was universally concluded that, notwithstanding the abandonment by the Crown of the verdict on which they had been sentenced, they, because of their admitted complicity in the rescue, would be held to imprisonment--probably penal servitude--for a term of years. Considerable astonishment was excited, some days subsequently to Maguire's pardon, by a statement that, in the case of the other prisoners included in the verdict, "the law should take its course." No one credited this declaration for an instant, and most persons felt that the Crown officials were indulging in an indecent piece of mockery. Amidst this universal incredulity, however--this disdainful and indignant disbelief--the prisoners' solicitor, Mr. Roberts, vigilant and untiring to the last, took the necessary steps to pray arrest of execution pending decision of the serious law points raised on the trial. Some of the most eminent counsel in England certified solemnly that these points were of the gravest nature, and would, in their opinion, be fully established on argument before the judges; in which event the conviction would be legally quashed, independently of the substantial abandonment of it as false and untenable by the Crown in Maguire's case.