The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 10, No. 282, November 10, 1827 — John Shaqi
The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 10, No. 282, November 10, 1827Various
General
The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 10, No. 282, November 10, 1827
Various
Popular literature -- Great Britain -- Periodicals
The constable, with assistance, procured horses to guard the prisoner to
Carlisle, to abide his doom at the next assizes. While the escort was
preparing, the prisoner, before he was carried from the fatal apartment,
desired to look at the dead body, which had been deposited upon the
large table, (at the head of which Harry Wakefield had just presided)
until the surgeons should examine the wound. The face of the corpse was
decently covered with a napkin. Robin Oig removed the cloth, and gazed
on the lifeless visage. While those present expected that the wound,
which had so lately flooded the apartment with gore, would send forth
fresh streams at the touch of the homicide, Robin Oig replaced the
covering, with the brief exclamation, "He was a pretty man!"
My story is nearly ended. The unfortunate Highlander stood his trial at
Carlisle. I was myself present. The facts of the case were proved in the
manner I have related them; and whatever might be at first the prejudice
of the audience against a crime so un-English as that of assassination
from revenge, yet when the national prejudices of the prisoner had been
explained, which made him consider himself as stained with indelible
dishonour, the generosity of the English audience was inclined to regard
his crime as the aberration of a false idea of honour, rather than as
flowing from a heart naturally savage, or habitually vicious. I shall
never forget the charge of the venerable judge to the jury.
"We have had," he said, "in the previous part of our duty, (alluding to
some former trials,) to discuss crimes which infer disgust and
abhorrence, while they call down the well-merited vengeance of the law.
It is now our still more melancholy duty to apply its salutary, though
severe enactments to a case of a very singular character, in which the
crime (for a crime it is, and a deep one) arose less out of the
malevolence of the heart, than the error of the understanding--less from
any idea of committing wrong, than from an unhappily perverted notion of
that which is right. Here we have two men, highly esteemed, it has been
stated, in their rank of life, and attached, it seems, to each other as
friends, one of whose lives has been already sacrificed to a punctilio,
and the other is about to prove the vengeance of the offended laws; and
yet both may claim our commiseration at least, as men acting in
ignorance of each other's national prejudices, and unhappily misguided
rather than voluntarily erring from the path of right conduct.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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