on the coroner's inquest with revolting detail-all fill the wellregulated mind with indescribable disgust and horror of the fashionable mode of preserving, by the bloody sacrifices of a pistolling" chivalry," reeking from the fumes of midnight revelry and drunken brawls, the "refinements of civilization." With regard to the speech of Mr. ADOLPHUS, who defended his client Webber, by appealing to that "honourable" custom which says, "Thou shalt murder," against the laws, Divine and human, which say, "Thou shalt not," we can make great allowances for counsel struggling for the deliverance of a client in a desperate case, and where both the law and the facts are against him. But we cannot avoid saying, that the learned counsel seems to have somewhat gone out of his way in making an attack upon the public journals, that exerted themselves to put down the odious practice which brought his client to the bar of criminal justice, and has subjected him to the disgrace and penalties of a convicted felon. We came forward on this subject, because we saw that duelling was defended as a necessity of civilization," of which we consider it one of the foulest stains that ever disgraced society.

Mr. ADOLPHUS is represented to have said, "It was not many hours since he had read in a newspaper a most scandalous paragraph, recommending what sort of punishment persons should receive who had been convicted of taking part in a duel." If the learned counsel, whose zeal and eloquence on behalf of his clients at all times have raised him to deserved celebrity at the criminal bar, alludes to what we said in reference to the punishment that ought to be inflicted upon persons convicted of homicide by duelling, we can only say, in answer to his inculpatory observation, that we exercised as clear a right to denounce the absurd and barbarous practice of duelling, as he did to defend it. As to the late murder at Wimbledon, which formed the subject of the inquiry in question, we did not presume to say who were the guilty parties involved in that sanguinary and disreputable transaction. But we did, as we had a right to do, express in terms of unmitigated disgust our reprobation of the whole affair as it was presented to the public, in the evidence taken before the coroner's jury.

We also took the liberty of recommending the sort of punishment which should be applied in case of a conviction of the guilty parties, not particularly in that affair, but in any case of homicide by duelling, and we proposed transportation for life to a penal settlement, as in the most aggravated cases of manslaughter. Why does the learned counsel object to this? Under the law as it now exists, his client has been convicted of a capital offence, and the law which declares all death by deliberate fighting with mortal weapons to be murder, orders his client to be hanged up by the neck until his body be dead. Why then are we to be censured for proposing a punishment which, though severe, is a mitigated one compared with that pronounced by the law, and in accordance with which, within time of living memory, an officer of rank in the British service was publicly executed?

On this subject we agree with the Globe, which, in reference to the trial of Young and Webber, said on Saturday, "We honour the good sense and inflexible integrity displayed by the jury yesterday, who have shown the votaries at the shrine of false honour, that if unmindful of the Divine law, they seek to quench the unhallowed flame of revenge in the blood of their fellow-man, the laws of their country, administered with unbending integrity by British judges and juries, will interpose to put down a practice barbarous in its origin, irrational and wicked in its nature, and disgraceful to us as a civilized and Christian nation."

As to the argument of Mr. ADOLPHUS, or rather the excuse of the act of his client founded upon the custom to violate the law, we have heard of custom itself constituting law, in the absence of any positive enactment to the contrary; but we never heard that a custom in acknowledged violation of positive law, has any other weight in a court of justice, than to aggravate the offence by exhibiting the disobedience to the law as systematic. However, this matter was placed in its proper light by the emphatic observation of Mr. Justice ALDERSON.

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The Irish Paper, called the Waterford Mail, which has taken up this subject strongly in a land where the influence of

sound public opinion was very much wanted to abate the nuisance, having copied our observations, introduced them, with the following remarks of its own :

"DUELLING. In another portion of our publication will be found an exceedingly well-written and forcible extract from the Morning Herald, respecting the fashionable, and, to a certain degree legalized, system of murder, termed duelling. The unfortunate slave of passion, who, labouring under the excitement of the moment, or suffering, it may be, under real or imaginary wrongs, perpetrates the awful deed of sending a fellowmortal into eternity, is subjected to the last dreadful sentence of the law; while the Noble felon, or the fashionable roué, who deliberately plans the murder of, it may be, a bosom friend, passes not only unpunished, but applauded! In the former case much can be said in extenuation; in the latter, nothing. One may plead the fearful excitement of the moment, while the fashionable murderer suffers twenty-four hours of calm deliberation to pass over his head, before he enters the lists of assassination, in relation to a matter of the most trivial importance."

Mitigation of Sentences on convicted Duellists.-Oct. 8, 1838.

Ir the law of the land be not put in force for the suppression of the senseless barbarity of duelling-if, because legislators sometimes violate their own laws, the executive government is to allow the convicted offenders, whoever they may be, to escape all punishment-then, we say, a most dangerous example of successful crime is held out to the people, and all that falls from those who are entrusted with the administration of justice, touching the heinousness of murder, or the wilful, malicious, and deliberate destruction of human life, is idle declamation or rank hypocrisy.

What! Is there to be one species of murder protected against legal animadversion, and invested, as it were, with the sanctity of a virtue? Or, if the solemnities prescribed by the law for the "inquisition of blood" should be performed with the most scrupulous compliance with the theory of justice, from the opening of the coroner's inquest to the last duty of the petty jury in returning a verdict of guilty, are the whole of those solemn proceedings to be set at nought and derided in practice, and the convicted felons to be told they were justified in commiting murder by a law which is stronger than that

which condemns them-a law written in the code of fashion, with which the law of the land must not dare to meddlea law equally repudiated by Christian morality and pagan wisdom, but which moral cowardice and coxcombry combine to support?

Better that the law which declares homicide by duelling to be murder should be altogether repealed, and one conformable with the fashionable custom enacted in its stead, recommending for honourable distinction every pistol-practised ruffian who puts a leaden bullet through the head or heart of a man whom he has insulted or injured, than that the solemnities of justice should be so mocked, and the most awful of all inquiries which can engage the attention and exercise the faculties of judges and juries, turned into a mere farce!-But, if the law against murder by duelling be repealed, we must call for the repeal of the law against every other species of murder also. It is certainly neither just, nor of good example, that vulgar murderers should be inexorably hanged, and that those who practise the art of genteel assassination by superior adroitness in the handling of the pistol, should upon conviction of murder-not only escape the punishment of death, or of transportation for life to a penal colony, but-be even saved from the penalty of temporary imprisonment, with the degradation of hard labour at the tread-mill or the hulks.

When Judges tell jurors, sitting to try cases of this sort, that they are bound by their consciences, on proof of the crime and identity of the party, to return a verdict of wilful murder, will not jurors have a right to ask of Judges, "Why insist upon a rigid performance of a duty by us, which you want inclination or courage to perform yourselves? Why are we to brave the tyrant custom of fashion by stamping the brand of the murderer on the brow of the blood-stained duellist, while you cower beneath that custom, and dread the displeasure of its obedient fools more than you reverence the law, which, as well as ourselves, you are sworn faithfully to administer? Why should we convict men of felony, whom you dare not punish?" When the Home Secretary refuses to recommend a vulgar murderer to the clemency of the Crown, where nothing

more is asked than that coercion and hard labour for life should be substituted for the revolting punishment of blood, he usually alleges as a reason that the Judge, who tried the prisoner, has declined to report in his favour. Are we not to infer from this, that if convicted duellists escape with little or no punishment, the Judges by whom they were tried have reported in their favour?

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Duelling.-Lord CARDIGAN held to bail.-Sept. 30, 1840.

THE charge against Lord CARDIGAN [of firing at and wounding Captain TUCKETT, in a duel,] is a charge of a capital offence; and let it not be said that the statute which annexes such a punishment to the crime is one which has fallen into desuetude, for it is not old enough to have become obsolete. It is scarcely more than three years since [see p. 232,] Lord John RUSSELL, having undertaken a revision of the criminal law, more especially that part of it relating to offences against the person, induced Parliament to adopt, as a part of the revised code, the enactment under which Lord CARDIGAN has been held to bail, for the offence of wounding Captain TUCKETT with intent to murder. The enactment in question constitutes the second section of the act of the 1st Vict., cap. 85. Το this enactment, as well as to many other parts of Lord John RUSSELL'S amended criminal-law, we urged objections at the time.

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It may be asked, why we approve of the application of this capital law to the case of Lord CARDIGAN? Because, as we have said before, we do not like that there should be one law for the rich, and another for the poor. Lord CARDIGAN is a legislator, and very probably assented in person as well as by "his order" to the enactment under which he is now to be tried on a charge of felony. Let him then not be exempt from his own law against crimes of violence and blood, while for such offences the sword of justice is inexorably wielded against the poorer and more ignorant members of society.

Though a peer of the realm may be tried by a jury in the ordinary courts of law for a misdemeanor, it is his privilege, when