name. Suppose her to be modest, retiring,
otherwise only known for her virtues, charities,
and noble actions. Suppose an abandoned
sharper, so debased, so wanting in the
manhood of a commonly vile swindler, so lost
to every sense of shame and disgrace, as to
conceive the original idea of hunting this
young lady through life until she buys him
off with money. Suppose him to adjust the
speculation deliberately with himself. "I
know nothing of her, I never saw her; but
I am a bankrupt, with no character and no
trade that brings me in any money; and I
mean to make the pursuit of her, my trade.
She seeks retirement; I will drag her out of
it. She avoids notoriety; I will force it upon
her. She is rich; she shall stand and deliver.
I am poor; I will have plunder. The opinion
of society. What is that to me? I know
the Law, and the Law will be my friend—
not hers."

It is very difficult, I know, to suppose such
a set of circumstances, or to imagine such an
animal not caged behind iron bars or knocked
on the head. But, let us stretch elastic fancy
to such an extreme point of supposition. He
goes to work at the trade he has taken up,
and works at it, industriously, say for fifteen,
sixteen, seventeen years. He invents the
most preposterous and transparent lies, which
not one human being whose ears they ever
reach can possibly believe. He pretends that
the lady promised to marry him—say, in a
nonsensical jingle of rhymes which he produces,
and which he says and swears (for what will he
not say and swear except the truth?) is the
production of the lady's hand. Before
incapable country justices, and dim little
farthing rushlights of the law, he drags this
lady at his pleasure, whenever he will. He
makes the Law a screw to force the hand she
has had the courage to close upon her purse
from the beginning. He makes the Law a
rack on which to torture her constancy, her
affections, her consideration for the living,
and her veneration for the dead. He shakes
the letter of the Law over the heads of the
puny tribunals he selects for his infamous
purpose, and frightens them into an endurance
of his audacious mendacity. Because
the Law is a Law of the peddling letter and
not of the comprehensive spirit, this magistrate
shall privately bribe him with money to
condescend to overlook his omission
(sanctioned by the practice of years) of some
miserable form as to the exact spot in which
he puts his magisterial signature upon a
document; and that commissioner shall publicly
compliment him upon his extraordinary
acquirements, when it is manifest upon the
face of the written evidence before the same
learned commissioner's eyes in court, that he
cannot so much as spell. But he knows the
Law. And the letter of the Law is with the
rascal, and not with the rascal's prey.

For, we are to suppose that all through
these years, he is never punished with any
punishment worthy of the name, for his real
offence. He is now and then held to bail,
gets out of prison, and goes to his trade
again. He commits wilful and corrupt perjury,
  down a byeway, and is lightly punished
for that; but he takes his brazen face along
the high road of his guilt, uncrushed. The
blundering, babbling, botched Law, in
splitting hairs with him, makes business for
itself; they get on very well together—
worthy companions—shepherds both.

Now, I am willing to admit that if such a
case as this, could by any possibility be; if
it could go on so long and so publicly, as that
the whole town should have the facts within
its intimate knowledge; if it were as well
known as the Queen's name; if it never
presented itself afresh, in any court, without
awakening an honest indignation in the
breasts of all the audience not learned in the
Law; and yet if this nefarious culprit were
just as free to drive his trade at last as he
was at first, and the object of his ingenious
speculation could find absolutely no redress;
then, and in that case, I say, I am willing to
admit that the Law would be a false pretence
and a self-convicted failure. But, happily,
and as we all know, this is one of the things
that cannot be done.

No. Supposing such a culprit face to face
with it, the Law would address him thus.
"Stand up, knave, and hear me! I am not
the thing of shreds and patches you suppose.
I am not the degraded creature whom any
wretch may invoke to gratify his basest
appetites and do his dirtiest work. Not for
that, am I part and parcel of a costly system
maintained with cheerfulness out of the
labours of a great free people. Not for that,
do I continually glorify my Bench and my
Bar, and, from my high place, look
complacently upon a sea of wigs. I am not a
jumble and jargon of words, fellow; I am a
Principle. I was set up here, by those who
can pull me down—and will, if I be
incapable—to punish the wrong-doer, for the
sake of the body-politic in whose name I
act, and from whom alone my power is
derived. I know you, well, for a wrong-doer;
I have it in proof before me that you are a
forsworn, crafty, defiant, bullying, pestilent
impostor. And if I be not an impostor too,
and a worse one, my plainest duty is to set
my heel upon you—which I mean to do before
you go hence.

"Attend to me yet, knave. Hold your
peace! You are one of those landsharks
whose eyes have twinkled to see the driving of
coaches and six through Acts of Parliament,
and who come up with their dirty little dog's
meat carts to follow through the same
crooked ways. But you shall know, that I
am something more than a maze of tortuous
ins and outs, and that I have at least one
plain road—to wit, the road by which, for the
general protection, and in the exercise of my
first function, I mean to send you into safe