The speech occupied several hours, and it would take nearly fifty of our pages to reproduce it. The points relied on for the defence were, that the indictment contained only garbled extracts from an article which had, as a whole, the exact opposite of the tendency imputed to it; that the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (of which society Brougham and Denman were both leading members!) had recently asked Cobbett’s permission to reprint his celebrated Letter to the Luddites against machine-breaking and other violence, with the same objects in view that he had himself; that Mr. Goodman, labourer and incendiary, had been pardoned, or had unaccountably disappeared, since his “confession,” and that there was a letter (which Cobbett produced, and read) written by Goodman himself, totally different in style and spelling; that the _Times_ newspaper had recently libelled the judges, and called the close-borough members “the hired lacqueys of public delinquents,” and yet was unmolested as long as it continued to puff the Ministry; that a declaration from the tradesmen and labourers in and around Battle (who had heard Cobbett’s lectures), made it clear that the persons who had produced the three confessions were.… No, Mr. Cobbett did not apply to their conduct the terms that it deserved, but contented himself with reading the declaration; and, the notorious fact that he had spent the best part of his life in the endeavour to instruct the labouring classes, in the arts of happiness and goodness. The speech of the defendant was occasionally interrupted by applause; and once by the judge, on the score of irrelevancy; an objection, however, which was not sustained. And a stray joke or two shone out, as when Cobbett spoke of Mr. Gurney (junior counsel) as “a mere truffle-hunter; he neither sees nor smells anything but the immediate object of his search,” in allusion to his special search of the _Register_ for indictable matter; or in his sarcastic reference to the “open, fair, and candid,” professions of the Attorney-General, which he said were traceable not to the wig on his head, but to the whig in his heart; and in such a passage as this, his humour would prevail:-- “Such are the odious and foul calumnies which have been heaped upon me, that I dare say you expected to see me hoofed and horned, a pair of horns on my head and hoofs up to my knees, terminating with a cloven foot.”