I cannot personally vouch for, as my attention was engaged at the moment by the adverse claimant, the Honorable James Kingston, who exhibited one of the most irresistibly comic, wo-begone, lackadaisical aspects it is possible to conceive.  He made a hurried and most undignified exit, and was immediately followed by the discomfited “family” solicitors.  Chilton was conveyed to a station-house, and the next day was fully committed for trial.  He was convicted at the next sessions, and sentenced to seven years’ transportation; and the “celebrated” firm of Flint and Sharp, derived considerable lustre, and more profit, from this successful stroke of professional dexterity.

JANE ECCLES

The criminal business of the office was, during the first three or four years of our partnership, entirely superintended by Mr. Flint; he being more an fait, from early practice, than myself in the art and mystery of prosecuting and defending felons, and I was thus happily relieved of duties which, in the days when George III. was king, were frequently very oppressive and revolting.  The criminal practitioner dwelt in an atmosphere tainted alike with cruelty and crime, and pulsating alternately with merciless decrees of death, and the shrieks and wailings of sentenced guilt.  And not always guilt!  There exist many records of proofs, incontestable, but obtained too late, of innocence having been legally strangled on the gallows in other cases than that of Eliza Fenning.  How could it be otherwise with a criminal code crowded in every line with penalties of death, nothing but—­death?  Juster, wiser times have dawned upon us, in which truer notions prevail of what man owes to man, even when sitting in judgment on transgressors; and this we owe, let us not forget, to the exertions of a band of men who, undeterred by the sneers of the reputedly wise and practical men of the world, and the taunts of “influential” newspapers, persisted in teaching that the rights of property could be more firmly cemented than by the shedding of blood—­law, justice, personal security more effectually vindicated than by the gallows.  Let me confess that I also was, for many years, amongst the mockers, and sincerely held such “theorists” and “dreamers” as Sir Samuel Romilly and his fellow-workers in utter contempt.  Not so my partner, Mr. Flint.  Constantly in the presence of criminal judges and juries, he had less confidence in the unerring verity of their decisions than persons less familiar with them, or who see them only through the medium of newspapers.  Nothing could exceed his distress of mind if, in cases in which he was prosecuting attorney, a convict died persisting in his innocence, or without a full confession of guilt.  And to such a pitch did this morbidly-sensitive feeling at length arrive, that he all at once refused to undertake, or in any way meddle with, criminal prosecutions, and they were consequently turned over to our head