already said, the law avoids every act of the lunatic during the period of the lunacy; although the delusion may be extremely circumscribed; although the mind may be quite sound in all that is not within the shades of the very partial eclipse; and although the act to be avoided can in no way be connected with the influence of the insanity:-But, to deliver a lunatic from responsibility to criminal justice,-above all, in a case of such atrocity as the present, relation between the disease and the act should be apparent. Where the connexion is doubtful, the judgment should certainly be most indulgent, from the great difficulty of diving into the secret sources of a disordered mind;-but still, I think that, as a doctrine of law, the delusion and the act should be connected. I cannot allow the protection of insanity to a man who only exhibits violent passions and malignant resentments, acting upon real circumstances; who is impelled to evil from no morbid delusions; but who proceeds upon the ordinary perceptions of the mind. I cannot consider such a man as falling within the protection which the law gives, and is bound to give, to those whom it has pleased God, for mysterious causes, to visit with this most afflicting calamity. He alone can be so emancipated, whose disease (call it what you will) consists, not merely in seeing with a prejudiced eye, or with odd and absurd particularities, differing, in many respects, from the contemplations of sober sense, upon the actual existences of things; but, he only whose whole reasoning and corresponding conduct, though governed by the ordinary dictates of reason, proceed upon something which has no foundation or existence.

"Gentlemen, it has pleased God so to visit the unhappy man before you; to shake his reason in its citadel;-to cause him to build up, as realities, the most impossible phantoms of the mind, and to be impelled by them as motives irresistible: the whole fabric being nothing but the unhappy vision of his disease-existing no where else having no foundation whatsoever in the very nature of things. p. 17, 19.

He adds a refutation, after dwelling at some length on the present case, of a proposition, much too vaguely broached by reasoners on this subject, that every person ought to be responsible for crimes who has the knowledge of good and evil.

"Let me suppose that the character of an insane delusion consisted in the belief that some given person was any brute animal, or an inanimate being, (and such cases have existed), and that upon the trial of such a lunatic for murder, you firmly, upon your oaths, were convinced, upon the uncontradicted evidence of an hundred persons, that he believed the man he had destroyed, to have been a potter's vessel; that it was quite impossible to doubt that fact, although to all other intents and purposes he was sane; conversing, reasoning, and acting, as men not in any manner tainted with insanity, converse, and reason, and conduct themselves: suppose further, that he believed the man whom he destroyed, but whom he destroyed as a potter's vessel, to be the property of another; and that he had malice against such supposed person, and that he meant to injure him, knowing the act he was doing to

be malicious and injurious, and that, in short, he had full knowledge of all the principles of good and evil; yet would it be possible to convict such a person of murder, if, from the influence of his disease, he was ignorant of the relation he stood in to the man he had destroyed, and was utterly unconscious that he had struck at the life of a human being? I only put this case, and many others might be brought as examples to illustrate, that the knowledge of good and evil is too general a description." p. 24.

The case of Hadfield was brought within the law thus laid down, by evidence of his having been most severely wounded in service, so as to make him at times wholly insane ;-that he laboured under a delusion of a peculiar cast, being firmly persuaded he was to save mankind by dying a violent death ;-yet that this death must be inflicted without the guilt of suicide;—that he' had recently attempted to kill his infant child, of which he was in general passionately fond;-and that his whole demeanour and conversation had been those of a most loyal subject, attached with peculiarly zealous feelings to the family and service of the king. It is said that Lord Kenyon, who presided at the trial,* appeared much against the prisoner while the evidence was giving for the crown; but when Mr. Erskine had stated the principle upon which he grounded his defence, and when his Lordship found that the facts came up to the case opened for the prisoner, he delivered to the Attorney-General the opinion of the Court, that the case should not be proceeded in: So there was a verdict of acquittal, without any reply for the Crown.

The speech for the Madras Council was delivered soon after Mr. Erskine came to the bar, on an occasion which excited unexampled interest in those days of quiet, when the world was unaccustomed to great and strange events,-the arrest of Lord Pigot, in consequence of a misunderstanding between him and his Council. They were prosecuted at the desire of the House of Commons, and convicted; but when brought up for judgment, after Mr. Dunning, Mr. Erskine, and others, had been heard in mitigation, they were only sentenced to pay a fine of one thousand pounds, which was considered, and most justly, as a very lenient punishment. We abstain from entering further into the subject of this speech, because it is so similar to the late proceedings in the East, and in some of our other foreign settlements, that we prefer reserving the subject for a more regular and ample consideration. This speech is now published for the first time; and though from almost any other quarter it would excite no little admiration, we look upon it as one of the least brilliant of Mr. Erskine's exhibitions, and by no means the shortest.

• It was a trial at bar in the Court of King's Bench.

The last speech on a public trial contained in this volume, is the defence of Mr. Cuthell; against whom an indictment for a libel had been preferred, in circumstances of so peculiar a nature, that we are extremely glad to find the case recorded. The interest it excites is closely connected with the topics of the present day, and the attacks which ill-advised men are making upon the liberty of the press. We must, therefore, enter somewhat at large into the case.

Mr. Cuthell was an eminent bookseller, who dealt entirely in works upon literary subjects, being chiefly, if not altogether, a publisher of classical books. As such, he had been selected by Mr. Gilbert Wakefield to publish the various editions of classics and other books, particularly on theological subjects, with which he enriched the republic of letters. In 1798, the bishop of Landaff (Dr. Watson) published an address to the people on the subject of an apprehended invasion: exhorting them to defend their country, to be loyal towards their king, and to love the constitution ;-expounding to them how disagreeable a thing conquest is, and what risks attend revolutions, and above all French revolutions; and recommending a new plan of finance, the details of which we have forgotten, as we presume every body else has, except one ;-but the general purport was, to pay off some hundreds of millions of public debt by levying taxes on the capital of the country. This project was pretty universally ridiculed at the time, and might have been safely left to its fate. The rest of the work was, if not quite so original, at least a good deal sounder; and one should have thought no man so squeamish as to object to a bishop for preaching up the usual doctrine of rallying for the defence of the state. Mr. Wakefield, however, thought otherwise; and was so ill-advised as to throw away time, which might have been so admirably and usefully employed in expounding the classics and the scriptures, upon a political controversy. He wrote a pamphlet in answer to Dr. Watson, abounding indeed with point and wit,-in some parts sufficiently argumentative-in many very triumphant, but touching upon very tender ground in other passages, and conceived by the government to have a tendency hostile to the peace of the community, and unfavourable to the defence of the country. Mr. Wakefield, for example, pointed out the oppressions under which the people suffered, from the war and the taxes, and the novel restraints imposed on civil liberty. The ministers conceived, that this would excite discontent, and indispose the people to resist the enemy. For they reasoned thus. It is true, said they, there is no foundation for all this-the war does not press heavily upon the country,-it has only lasted for five years and a half-distressing not more than from thirty to forty thousand men, and erippling about a score thousands more,

at the outside; and then, if we have gained by it nothing of what we expected, we have at least got a few unwholesome and useless islands, which we never counted upon; and, at any rate, we have lost not an inch of territory, whatever our allies may have done. And as for taxes-what signify taxes! They only press upon the rich-the poor are quite well off-every thing is as cheap as it ought to be, if not as it has been ;-and those who can't afford to live, may die, or come upon the parish. All this we know, said the ministers, and the people feel it; they are quite easy, comfortable, and happy. But what signifies the evidence of facts? What though a man knows that he is as well off as possible? If Mr. Gilbert Wakefield is permitted to tell him that war and taxes have ground him down, there is no doubt that he will be believed, in spite of the evidence of sense and memory to the contrary-it being quite plain the perusal of a pamphlet is the only means by which a man can discover whether he is hungry and cold or not: Therefore, if such publications-such false and scandalous writings, are allowed to be read, we shall have the whole country convinced that bread is ten shillings a pound, and that no man has a farthing in his pocket.

Such was the reasoning of the government; and it is said that there were foolish people in those days, who suggested the possibility of answering Mr. Wakefield; arguing, weakly enough, that a single man, clearly on the wrong side of the question, might be refuted by the united exertions of all the rest of the community who were on the side of truth. But the ministers held such doctrines to be almost as bad as the seditious work itself,-contending, that nothing can be more dangerous than reasoning and answering in such cases: For, said they, what though Mr. Wake field is in the wrong, and is known by every body to be so? What though he is the only person who holds such doctrines? and what though there is not a man in the whole church, or out of it, who could not refute his pamphlet in a moment-and what though we have the whole truth on our side? Shall a government defend itself by argument? Then why have Attorney-generals and prisons?-So, such suggestions were overruled; and it was resolved to prosecute.

Mr. Wakefield had caused his work to be printed by a Mr. Hamilton, and sold by Mr. Johnson, the late respectable and independent bookseller in St. Paul's Church-yard: But he had sent a few copies to Mr. Cuthell's, who conceiving the work to be on a theological topic-for Mr. Wakefield had never written before on any other than classical and theological points, and Mr. Cuthell knew that Dr. Watson had engaged in theological controversy-sold several of the pamphlets, before he had the most remote guess that he was selling a political tract. As soon as he was in

formed that it was of this description, he immediately discontinued the sale of it. In the first place, Mr. Johnson and another bookseller were prosecuted and convicted for publishing it. This, however, not being deemed a sufficient refutation of the doctrines contained in it, the arguments of the Bishop of Llandaff were to be defended by prosecuting the author; but in order to make the answer complete, and that no part of the Bishop's work might be left unsupported, and no iota of Mr. Wakefield's positions go without a full exposure, it was deemed expedient to prosecute Mr. Cuthell also;-for he had sold one or two copies, mistaking it for a treatise on the middle voice, or the disputed passage in St. John.

Accordingly, Mr. Cuthell and Mr. Wakefield were tried on the same day; and Mr. Cuthell's case came on first. From what has been stated, it will appear that Mr. Erskine had here a different kind of point to urge, from any of those which generally bear upon cases of libel. With the libellous or innocent nature of the work, he professed that he had little concern:- Mr. Wakefield, its author, who appeared in Court to defend himself, was to treat that question, as more directly interested in it. The defence of Mr. Cuthell rested on his entire ignorance of the book he was selling, nay, of the subject on which it treated; and this ignorance he was to substantiate by evidence. Here, then, arises a question of no small importance, and rendered of more difficulty than naturally belongs to it, by the attempts made to confound it-Whether an act of publication shall be held of itself to fix the publisher with responsibility for the contents of the work? or, in other words, whether publication be conclusive evidence of a knowledge of those contents-such evidence as creates a presumption of law, not to be rebutted by contrary proof, and leading to an inference which overrules all considerations of fact whatever?

In civil cases, such presumptions are of necessity extremely common. Without entering into the principles upon which they are founded, we may mention an example or two. The liability of the owners of public carriages for the damage arising from the carelessness of their servants, and the general liability of a person for the acts (quoad civilem effectum) of his agent, to the extent to which he has given him authority, as to be bound by his undertakings, and to release, by his acquittance, those bound to him-the liability of a husband for the debts of his wife, and for damages occasioned by illegal acts committed by her, though without his privity-the liability of a master to make good the losses occasioned to the property or persons of others by certain negligent uses of his own property, as his horses or carriages. These, and a variety of other cases, are undeniable instances in which a person is held answerable in his own property for inju