to infamy for writing this book? Gentlemen, I tremble with indignation, to be driven to put such a question in England. Shall it be endured that a subject of this country (instead of being arraigned and tried for some single act in her ordinary courts, where the accusation, as soon at least as it is made public, is followed within a few hours by the decision,) may be impeached by the Commons for the transactions of twenty years,that the accusation shall spread as wide as the region of letters, that the accused shall stand, day after day, and year after year, as a spectacle before the public, which shall be kept in a perpetual state of inflammation against him; yet that he shall not, without the severest penalties, be permitted to submit any thing to the judgment of mankind in his defence? If this be law, (which it is for you to-day to decide,) such a man has no trial; that great hall, built by our fathers for English justice, is no longer a court, but an altar; and an Englishman, instead of being judged in it by God and his country, is a victim and a sacrifice.

TRIBUTE TO SCOTLAND, &c.-CURRAN'S SPEECH IN DEFENCE OF HAMILTON ROWAN.-JAN. 29, 1794.

GENTLEMEN,-I am glad that this question has not been brought forward earlier; I rejoice for the sake of the court, of the jury, and of the public repose, that this question has not been brought forward till now. In Great Britain, analogous circumstances have taken place.

At

the commencement of that unfortunate war, which has deluged all Europe with blood, the spirit of the English people was tremblingly alive to the terror of French principles; at that moment of general paroxysm, to accuse was to convict. The danger loomed larger to the public eye, from the misty region through which it was surveyed. We measure inaccessible heights by the shadows which they project, where the lowness and the distance of the light form the length of the shade. There is a sort of aspiring and adventurous credulity, which disdains assenting to obvious truths, and delights in catching at the improbability of circumstances, as its best ground of faith. To what other cause, gentlemen, can you 'ascribe, that in the wise, the reflecting, and the philosophic nation of Great Britain, a printer has been gravely found guilty of a libel, for publishing those resolutions to which the present minister of that kingdom had actually subscribed his name? To what other cause can you ascribe, what in my mind is still more astonishing, in such a country as Scotland -a nation cast in the happy medium between the spiritless acquiescence of submissive poverty, and the sturdy credulity of pampered wealth; cool and ardent; adventurous and persevering; winging her eagle flight against the blaze of every science, with an eye that never winks, and a wing that never tires; crowned as she is with the spoils of every art, and decked with the wreath of every muse, from the deep and scrutinizing researches of her Hume, to the sweet and simple, but not less pathetic and sublime morality of her Burns-how, from the bosom of a country like that, genius, and character, and talents, should be banished to a

distant barbarous soil;* condemned to pine under the horrid communion of vulgar vice and base-born profligacy, for twice the period that ordinary calculation gives to the continuance of human life? But I will not press an idea that is painful to me, and I am sure must be painful to you: I will only suggest one or two circumstances that you ought to consider, in order to found your verdict. You should consider the character of the person accused; and in this your task is easy. I will venture to say, there is not a man in this nation more known than the gentleman who is the subject of this prosecution, not only by the part he has taken in public concerns, and which he has taken in common with many, but still more so, by that extraordinary sympathy for human affliction, which, I am sorry to think, he shares with so small a number. There is not a day that you hear the cries of your starving manufacturers in your streets, that you do not also see the advocate of their sufferings that you do not see his honest and manly figure, with uncovered head, soliciting for their relief; searching the frozen heart of charity for every string that can be touched by compassion, and urging the force of every argument and every motive, save that which his modesty suppresses-the authority of his own generous example. Or if you see him not there, you may trace his steps to the private abode of disease, and famine, and despair; the messenger of heaven, bearing with him food, and medicine, and consolation. Are these the materials of which you suppose anarchy and public

* Mr. Curran alludes to the sentence of transportation passed in Scotland on Messrs. Muir, Palmer, &c.

rapine to be formed? Is this the man, on whom to fasten the abominable charge of goading on a frantic populace to mutiny and bloodshed? Is this the man, likely to apostatise from every principle that can bind him to the state; his birth, his property, his education, his character, and his children ? Let me tell you, gentlemen of the jury, if you agree with his prosecutors, in thinking that there ought to be a sacrifice of such a man, on such an occasion, and upon the credit of such evidence you are to convict him,never did you, never can you give a sentence consigning any man to public punishment with less danger to his person or to his fame; for where could the hireling be found to fling contumely or ingratitude at his head, whose private distresses he had not endeavoured to alleviate, or whose public condition he had not laboured to improve? Should your sentence, therefore, send him forth to that stage, which guilt alone can render infamous, let me tell you, he will not be like a little statue upon a mighty pedestal, diminishing by elevation; but he will stand a striking and imposing object upon a monument, which, if it does not (and it cannot) record the atrocity of his crime, must record the atrocity of his conviction. Upon this subject, therefore, credit me when I say, that I am still more anxious for you, than I can possibly be for him. I cannot but feel the peculiarity of your situation. Not the jury of his own choice, which the law of England allows, but which ours refuses; collected in that box by a person, certainly no friend to Mr. Rowan, certainly not very deeply interested in giving him a very impartial jury. Feeling this, as I am persuaded you do, you

cannot be surprised, however much you may be distressed, at the mournful presage, with which an anxious public is led to fear the worst from your possible determination. But I will not, for the justice and honour of our common country, suffer my mind to be borne away by such melancholy anticipation. I will not relinquish the confidence, that this day will be the period of his sufferings; and, however mercilessly he has been hitherto pursued, that your verdict will send him home to the arms of his family, and the wishes of his country. But if, which heaven forbid, it hath still been unfortunately determined, that because he has not bent to power and authoritybecause he would not bow down before the golden calf and worship it, he is to be bound, and cast into the furnace; I do trust in God, that there is a redeeming spirit in the constitution, which will be seen to walk with the sufferer through the flames, and to preserve him unhurt by the conflagration.

INVECTIVE AGAINST HASTINGS.

HAD a stranger, at this time, gone into the province of Oude, ignorant of what had happened since the death of Sujah Dowla, that man, who, with a savage heart, had still great lines of character, and who, with all his ferocity in war, had still, with a cultivating hand, preserved to his country the riches which it derived from benignant skies and a prolific soil-if this stranger, ignorant of all that had happened in the short interval, and observing the wide and general