chamber, where the criminality occurred, Justice Buller declared, "he thought the parent's indiscretion no excuse for the defendant's culpability;" and the verdict of 2001. damages was confirmed. There was a case of literal connivance: here, will they have the hardihood to hint even its suspicion? You all must remember, Gentlemen, the case of our own countryman, Captain Gore, against whom, only the other day, an English jury gave a verdict of 1,500l. damages, though it was proved that the person alleged to have been seduced was herself the seducer, going even so far as to throw gravel up at the windows of the defendant; yet Lord Ellenborough refused to disturb the verdict Thus you may see I rest not on my own proofless and unsupported dictum. I rely upon grave decisions and venerable authoritiesnot only on the indignant denunciation of the moment, but on the deliberate concurrence of the enlightened and the dispassionate. I see my learned opponent smile. I tell him I would not care if the books were an absolute blank upon the subject. I would then make the human heart my authority! I would appeal to the bosom of every man who hears me, whether such a crime should grow unpunished into a precedent; whether innocence should be made the subject of a brutal speculation; whether the sacred seal of filial obedience, upon which the Almighty Parent has affixed his eternal fiat, should be violated by a blasphemous and selfish libertinism!

Gentlemen, if the cases I have quoted, palliated as they were, have been humanely marked by ample damages, what should you give here where there is nothing to excuse-where there is every thing to aggravate! The seduction was deliberate, it was three months in progress, its victim was almost a child, it was committed under the most alluring promises, it was followed by a deed of the most dreadful cruelty; but, above all, it was the act of a man commissioned by his own country, and paid by this, for the enforcement of the laws, and the preservation of society. No man more respects than I do the well-earned reputation of the British army;

"It is a school

Where every principle tending to honour

Is taught-if followed."

But in the name of that distinguished army, I here solemnly appeal against an act, which would blight its greenest laurels, and

lay its trophies prostrate in the dust. Let them war, but be it not on domestic happiness; let them invade, but be their country's hearths inviolable; let them achieve a triumph wherever their banners fly, but be it not over morals, innocence, and virtue. I know not by what palliation the defendant means to mitigate this enormity ;-will he plead her youth? it should have been her protection. Will he plead her levity? I deny the fact; but even were it true, what is it to him? what right has any man to speculate on the temperature of your wives and your daughters, that he may defile your bed, or desolate your habitation? Will he plead poverty? I never knew a seducer or an adulterer that did not. He should have considered that before. But is poverty an excuse for crime? Our law says, he who has not a purse to pay for it, must suffer for it in his person. It is a most wise declaration; and for my part, I never hear such a person plead poverty, that my first emotion is not a thanksgiving, that Providence has denied, at least, the instrumentality of wealth to the accomplishment of his purposes. Gentlemen, I see you agree with me. I waive the topic; and I again tell you, that if what I know will be his chief defence were true, it should avail him nothing. He had no right to speculate on this wretched creature's levity to ruin her, and still less to ruin her family. Remember, however, Gentlemen, that even had this wretched child been indiscreet, it is not in her name we ask for reparation; no, it is in the name of the parents her seducer has heart-broken; it is in the name of the poor helpless family he has desolated; it is in the name of that misery, whose sanctuary he has violated; it is in the name of law, virtue, and morality; it is in the name of that country whose fair fame foreign envy will make responsible for this crime; it is in the name of nature's dearest, tenderest sympathies; it is in the name of all that gives your toil an object, and your ease a charm, and your age a hope-I ask from you the value of the voor man's child.

SPEECH OF MR. PHILLIPS

IN THE CASE OF

BLAKE v. WILKINS:

DELIVERED IN THE COUNTY COURT-HOUSE, GALWAY.

May it please your Lordship,

THE Plaintiff's Counsel tell me, Gentlemen, most unexpectedly, that they have closed his case, and it becomes my duty to state to you that of the defendant. The nature of this action, you have already heard. It is one which, in my mind, ought to be very seldom brought, and very sparingly encouraged. It is founded on circumstances of the most extreme delicacy, and it is intended to visit with penal consequences the non-observance of an engagement, which is of the most paramount importance to society, and which of all others, perhaps, ought to be the most unbiassed,—an engagement which, if it be voluntary, judicious, and disinterested, generally produces the happiest effects; but which, if it be either unsuitable or compulsory, engenders not only individual misery, but consequences universally pernicious. There are few contracts between human beings which should be more deliberate than that of marriage. I admit it should be very cautiously promised; but, even when promised, I am far from conceding that it should invariably be performed; a thousand circumstances may form an impediment; change of fortune may render it imprudent, change of affection may make it culpable. The very party to whom the law gives the privilege of complaint has perhaps the most reason to be grateful,-grateful that its happiness has not been surrendered to caprice; grateful that religion has not constrained an unwilling acquiescence, or made an unavoidable desertion doubly criminal; grateful that an offspring has not been sacrificed to the indelicate and ungenerous enforcement; grateful that an innocent secret disinclination did not too late evince itself in an irresistible and irremediable disgust. You will agree with me, however, that if there exists any excuse for such an action, it is on

the side of the female; because every female object being more exclusively domestic, such a disappointment is more severe in its visitation; because the very circumstance concentrating their feelings renders them naturally more sensitive of a wound; because their best treasure, their reputation, may have suffered from the intercourse; because their chances of reparation are less, and their habitual seclusion makes them feel it more; because there is something in the desertion of their helplessness which almost immerges the illegality in the unmanliness of the abandonment. However, if a man seeks to enforce this engagement, every one feels some indelicacy attached to the requisition. I do not inquire into the comparative justness of the reasoning, but does not every one feel that there appears some meanness in forcing a female into an alliance? Is it not almost saying, “I will expose to public shame the credulity on which I practised, or you must pay to me in monies numbered, the profits of that heartless speculation; I have gambled with your affections, I have secured your bond, I will extort the penalty either from your purse or your reputation!" I put a case to you where the circumstances are reciprocal; where age, fortune, situation, are the same; where there is no disparity of years to make the suppo. sition ludicrous; where there is no disparity of fortune to render it suspicious. Let us see whether the present action can be so palliated, or whether it does not exhibit a picture of fraud and avarice, and meanness and hypocrisy, so laughable, that it is almost impossible to criticise it, and yet so debasing that human pride almost forbids its ridicule.

It has been left me to defend my unfortunate old client from the double battery of Love and of Law, which at the age of sixtyfive has so unexpectedly opened on her. Oh, Gentlemen, how vain-glorious is the boast of beauty! How misapprehended have been the charms of youth, if years and wrinkles can thus despoil their conquests, and depopulate the navy of its prowess, and beguile the bar of its eloquence! How mistaken were all the amatory poets from Anacreon downwards, who preferred the bloom of the rose and the thrill of the nightingale, to the saffron hide and dulcet treble of sixty-five! Even our own sweet bard has had the folly to declare, that

"He once had heard tell of an amorous youth,
Who was caught in his grandmother's bed;

But owns he had ne'er such a liquorish tooth,

As to wish to be there in his stead."

Royal wisdom has said, that we live in a "NEW ERA." The reign of old women has commenced; and if Johanna Southcote con⚫ verts England to her creed, why should not Ireland, less pious perhaps, but at least equally passionate, kneel before the shrine of the irresistible WIDOW WILKINS. It appears, Gentlemen, to have been her happy fate to have subdued particularly the deathdealing professions. Indeed in the love episodes of the heathen mythology, Mars and Venus were considered as inseparable. I know not whether any of you have ever seen a very beautiful print representing the fatal glory of Quebec, and the last moments of its immortal conqueror-if so, you must have observed the figure of the staff physician, in whose arms the hero is expiring-that identical personage, my Lord, was the happy swain, who, forty or fifty years ago, received the reward of his valour and his skill in the virgin hand of my venerable client! The Doctor lived something more than a century, during a great part of which Mrs. Wilkins was his companion-alas, Gentlemen, long as he lived, he lived not long enough to behold her beauty—

"That beauty, like the Aloe flower,

But bloomed and blossomed at fourscore."

He was, however, so far fascinated as to bequeath to her the lega cies of his patients, when he found he was predoomed to follow them. To this circumstance, very far be it from me to hint, that Mrs. W. is indebted for any of her attractions. Rich, however, she undoubtedly was, and rich she would still as undoubtedly have continued, had it not been for her intercourse with the family of the plaintiff. I do not impute it as a crime to them that they happened to be necessitous, but I do impute it as both criminal and ungrateful, that after having lived on the generosity of their friend, after having literally exhausted her most prodigal liberality, they should drag her infirmities before the public gaze, vainly supposing that they could hide their own contemptible avarice in the more prominent exposure of her melancholy dotage The father of the plaintiff, it cannot be unknown to you, was for many years in the most indigent situation. Perhaps it is not a matter of concealment either, that he found in Mrs. Wilkins a generous benefactress. She assisted and supported him, until at last his increasing necessities reduced him to take refuge in an act of insolvency. During their intimacy, frequent allusion was made