stand before your lordships now with a free heart, and with a light conscience, ready to abide the issue of your sentences.  And now, my lords, perhaps this is the fittest time that I might put one sentiment on record, and it is this:  Standing as I do between this dock and the scaffold; it may be now, or to-morrow, or it may be never; but whatever the result may be, I have this sentiment to put on record.  That in any part I have taken, I have not been actuated by animosity to Englishmen.  For I have spent some of the happiest and most prosperous days of my life in England; and in no part of my career have I been actuated by enmity to Englishmen, however much I may have felt the injustice of English rule on this island.  My lords, I have nothing more to say.  It is not for having loved England less, but for having loved Ireland more, that I stand now before you.”

Mr. O’Donohoe confined himself to a few words concerning his trial.

MR. MEAGHER.—­“My lords, it is my intention to say a few words only.  I desire that the last act of a proceeding which has occupied so much of the public time should be of short duration.  Nor have I the indelicate wish to close the dreary ceremony of a State prosecution with a vain display of words.  Did I fear that hereafter when I shall be no more the country I have tried to serve would think ill of me, I might, indeed, avail myself of this solemn moment to vindicate my sentiments and my conduct.  But I have no such fear.  The country will judge of those sentiments and that conduct in a light far different from that in which the jury by which I have been convicted have viewed them; and by the country, the sentence which you, my lords, are about to pronounce, will be remembered only as the severe and solemn attestation of my rectitude and truth.  Whatever be the language in which that sentence be spoken, I know that my fate will meet with sympathy, and that my memory will be honoured.  In speaking thus, accuse me not, my lords, of an indecorous presumption.  To the efforts I have made in a just and noble cause, I ascribe no vain importance—­nor do I claim for those efforts any high reward.  But it so happens, and it will ever happen so, that they who have tried to serve their country, no matter how weak the effort may have been, are sure to receive the thanks and the blessings of its people.  With my country, then, I leave my memory—­my sentiments—­my acts—­proudly feeling that they require no vindication from me this day.  A jury of my countrymen, it is true, have found me guilty of the crime of which I stood indicted.  For this I entertain not the slightest feeling of resentment toward them.  Influenced as they must have been by the charge of the Lord Chief Justice, they could have found no other verdict.  What of that charge?  Any strong observations on it, I feel sincerely, would ill befit the solemnity of this scene; but I would earnestly beseech of you, my lord—­you, who preside on that bench—­when