“Upon these facts it will be for your lordships to say whether all the counts of the indictment are not fully proved and supported. With respect to the first count, it is painful to use the language which it necessarily recites; but it will be for your lordships to say whether, in point of law, the noble prisoner at the bar did not shoot at Captain Tuckett with intent to commit the crime therein mentioned. I at once acquit the Earl of Cardigan of anything unfair in the conduct of this duel. Something has been said respecting the noble Earl’s pistols having rifle barrels, while those of Captain Tuckett had not such barrels. However that may have been, I have the most perfect conviction, that nothing but what was fair and honourable was intended; and that the Earl of Cardigan most probably imagined, when he carried his pistols to the field with him, that one of them would be directed against his own person. Nor do I suppose that there was any grudge, any personal animosity, any rancour or malignity, on the part of the noble Earl towards his antagonist. Whether the noble Earl gave or received the invitation to go out, I believe his only object was to preserve his reputation, and maintain his station in society as an officer and a gentleman. His lordship is in the army; he is Lieutenant-Colonel of the 11th Hussars; and no doubt he, on this occasion, only complied with what he considered to be necessary to be done, according to the usages of society. But, if death had ensued under these circumstances, it would have been a great calamity; and, although moralists of high name have excused and even defended the practice of duelling, your lordships must consider what, in this respect, is the law of England. There can be no doubt that, by the law of England, parties who go out deliberately to fight a duel, if death ensues, are guilty of murder. It will be my duty to state to your lordships a few of the leading authorities on this point. I will mention the highest authorities known to the law of England—Hale, Hawkins, Foster, and Blackstone. Hale, in his Pleas of the Crown, vol. i. page 453, says:—‘If A and B suddenly fall out, and they presently agree to fight in a field, and run and fetch their weapons, and go to the field and fight, and A kills B, this is not murder, but homicide; for it is but a continuance of the sudden falling out, and the blood was never cooled; but if there were deliberation, as that they went on the next day,—nay, though it was the same day, if there were such a competent distance of time that in common presumption they had time of deliberation,—then it is murder.’ In the first volume of Hawkins’s Pleas of the Crown, c. 31, sec. 21, the law on this subject is thus laid down:—‘It seems agreed, that whenever two persons in cool blood meet and fight on a precedent quarrel, and one of them is killed, the other is guilty of murder, and cannot help himself by alleging that