the offence against my client, for which you are now called upon to award him the only remuneration the law allows; I cannot refrain from asserting my belief, that the defendant’s feelings must have been strangely perverted; he, doubtless, made his full calculation upon his outward profession, and his inward inclinations, and, I believe, I do him no more than justice, when I put into his mouth, and suppose by him uttered in his private moments, the expression used by an arch hypocrite of former days: 

    “I sigh, and with a piece of scripture,
    Tell them God bids us do good for evil: 
    And thus I clothe my naked villany
    With odds and ends stol’n forth of Holy Writ;
    And seem a saint, when most I play the devil.

“I regret, very much regret, gentlemen of the jury, I am thus obliged as a faithful advocate before you; but I have still another feature to disclose, and here I must declare, that it has astonished me more than I shall attempt to describe.  I alluded before, gentlemen, to the circumstance of the defendant’s being a married man.  Yes! he has a wife living in Freetown, whom (from fear she should take a right from his substance) he has turned out upon the world! to the generosity—­the kindness—­of the stranger! surely we may infer that he may be left at home with more ample means to gratify his passions.  He has also no children; this I am sorry for on his account; surely he would have paused before he would have offered them such an example; before he would systematically set about the seduction of a woman, surrounded even by her grand-children.

“I turn now to my client; but, indeed, I have little more to add respecting him.  He is poor, because he has many claims on his industry; his wife has born him several children; and some of these children are grown up, and married, and in their turn have children; the connexion between the plaintiff and his wife has therefore been of long standing, in fact on their entrance into life they became attached to each other.  The connexion was not for several years sanctioned by the rites of our religion, but it was not less a marriage; the assent of the heart was complete, and it has been sanctioned by what the parties thought binding; further ceremony could only add more publicity to the engagement.  Yet after many years mutual intercourse, they resolved to give that intercourse every tie, and were consequently legally married according to the rites of the Church of England.  I mention these particulars because I apprehend my learned friend will set about pulling their family history to pieces, and endeavour to shew that my client and his wife might have had some little family jars; be it so, gentlemen, let him make the endeavour:  I will tell him that their jars are the pleasures of the married life; they are the tornadoes of the marriage state, which clear away the mists and fogs, that, alas, will at times intrude themselves, to make the succeeding calm