Note (return) — Notes of a Reader

"Gentlemen of the Jury, I cannot believe that you will lend yourselves to such a grovelling prosecution—persecution, as this. I pause not to investigate where the evil spirit arose, in principles or agents, against this injured and calumniated female. If the great ones of our earth will disgrace themselves—if they will listen to the suggestions of envy, hatred, and malice, and all uncharitableness, I trust that you, more humble members of the community, will not be partakers of these evil passions. Where the prosecutor has sustained no personal fear and no personal loss, it is impossible that any offence can have been committed. You are not twelve despots sitting upon a case of high treason against the game-laws, and are to have your consciences racked, to bring in a verdict of trespass, where no damage can be proved; you are not required to strain right against justice and honesty. What is the offence? How is our Lord the King or his subjects aggrieved? Those rags!—I know not what the splendid household of the Duke may require for matches and tinder; for this is all the value that can be attached to them. Shall we call for them back again, lest the Duke and the Duchess should lose their recovered treasure? I am not disposed to dispute their right; for even if they were the perquisite of the housekeeper, I am convinced that she would not get a farthing emolument for those tattered remnants of nobility. Of one thing I am well assured, that there is not a sufficiency of sound linen in the whole to make lint enough to cover the wound that the reputation of the noble Duke and Duchess has sustained in this disgraceful prosecution. Gentlemen, I will trouble you no further—I confidently expect your verdict." And the woman was acquitted: and from that day the powers of Thurlow, in voice, sarcasm, gesture, and all the superior intonations of browbeating, which raised him to the most dangerous pinnacle of legal greatness, became known, and rapidly advanced him to fame,14 and the grandchildren of his father to be enrolled among the established peers of our realm.