But soon after the work just mentioned was out, and when Mr. Sharp was better prepared, a third case occurred: this happened in the year 1770. Robert Stapylton, who lived at Chelsea, in conjunction with John Malony and Edward Armstrong, two watermen, seized the person of Thomas Lewis, an African slave, in a dark night, and dragged him to a boat lying in the Thames; they then gagged him and tied him with a cord, and rowed him down to a ship, and put him on board to be sold as a slave in Jamaica. This base action took place near the garden of Mrs. Banks, the mother of the late Sir Joseph Banks. Lewis, it appears, on being seized, screamed violently. The servants of Mrs. Banks, who heard his cries, ran to his assistance, but the boat was gone. On informing their mistress of what had happened, she sent for Mr. Sharp, who began now to be known as the friend of the helpless Africans, and professed her willingness to incur the expense of bringing the delinquents to justice. Mr. Sharp, with some difficulty, procured a _habeas corpus_, in consequence of which Lewis was brought from Gravesend just as the vessel was on the point of sailing. An action was then commenced against Stapylton, who defended himself on the plea, "That Lewis belonged to him as his slave." In the course of the trial, Mr. Dunning, who was counsel for Lewis, paid Mr. Sharp a handsome compliment; for he held in his hand Mr. Sharp's book, on the _Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery in England_, while he was pleading; and in his address to the jury he spoke and acted thus:--"I shall submit to you," says Mr. Dunning, "what my ideas are upon such evidence, reserving to myself an opportunity of discussing it more particularly, and reserving to myself a right to insist upon a position, which I will maintain (and here he held up the book to the notice of those present,) in any place and in any court of the kingdom, that our laws admit of no such property[A]." The result of the trial was, that the jury pronounced the plaintiff not to have been the property of the defendant, several of them crying out, "No property, no property." [Footnote A: It is lamentable to think that the same Mr. Dunning, in a cause of this kind, which came on afterwards, took the opposite side of the question.]