"
The counsel for the prisoner, Mr. Fairbrother, a man of considerable fame
in his profession, did not pretend directly to combat the arguments of
the King's Advocate. He began by lamenting that his senior at the bar,
Mr. Langtale, had been suddenly called to the county of which he was
sheriff, and that he had been applied to, on short warning, to give the
panel his assistance in this interesting case. He had had little time, he
said, to make up for his inferiority to his learned brother by long and
minute research; and he was afraid he might give a specimen of his
incapacity, by being compelled to admit the accuracy of the indictment
under the statute. "It was enough for their Lordships," he observed, "to
know that such was the law, and he admitted the advocate had a right to
call for the usual interlocutor of relevancy." But he stated, "that when
he came to establish his case by proof, he trusted to make out
circumstances which would satisfactorily elide the charge in the libel.
His client's story was a short, but most melancholy one. She was bred up
in the strictest tenets of religion and virtue, the daughter of a worthy
and conscientious person, who, in evil times, had established a character
for courage and religion, by becoming a sufferer for conscience' sake."
David Deans gave a convulsive start at hearing himself thus mentioned,
and then resumed the situation, in which, with his face stooped against
his hands, and both resting against the corner of the elevated bench on
which the Judges sate, he had hitherto listened to the procedure in the
trial.
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