“The facts which have placed the prisoner at the bar before you are these, and in detailing them I feel myself placed in circumstances of great difficulty, and also of peculiar delicacy. The discharge, however, of a public duty, which devolves upon me as leading law officer of the Crown, forces me into a course which I cannot avoid, unless I should shrink from promoting and accomplishing the ends of public justice. In my position, and in the discharge of my solemn duties here to-day, I can recognize no man’s rank, no man’s wealth, nor the prestige of any man’s name. So long as he stands at that bar, charged with great and heinous crimes, I feel it my duty to strip him of all the advantages of his birth and rank, and consider him simply a mere subject of the realm.
“In order to show you, gentlemen of the jury, the animux under which the prisoner at the bar acted, in the case before us, I must go back a little—a period of some months. At that time a highly respectable gentleman of an ancient and honored family in this country was one evening on his way home from this town, attended, as usual, by his servant. At a lonely place on a remote and antiquated road, which they took as a shorter way, it so happened that, in consequence of a sudden mist peculiar to those wild moors, they lost their path, and found themselves in circumstances of danger and distress. The servant, however, whistled, and his whistle was answered; a party of men, of freebooters, of robbers, headed by a person called the Red Rapparee, who has been convicted at these assizes, and who has been the scourge of the country for years, came up to them, and as the Rapparee had borne this respectable gentleman a deadly and implacable enmity for some time past, he was about to murder both master and man, and actually had his musket levelled at him, as others of his gang had at his aged servant, when a person, a gentleman named Reilly—[there there was a loud cheer throughout the court, which, however, was soon repressed, and the Attorney-General proceeded]—this person started out from an old ruin, met the robber face to face, and, in short, not only saved the lives of the gentleman and his servant, but conducted them safely home. This act of courage and humanity, by a Roman Catholic to a Protestant, had such an effect upon the old gentleman’s daughter, a lady whose name has gone far and wide for her many virtues and wonderful beauty, that an attachment was formed between the young gentleman and her. The prisoner at the bar, gentlemen, was a suitor for her hand; but as the young and amiable lady was acquainted with his character as a priest-hunter and persecutor, she, though herself a Protestant, could look upon him only with abhorrence. At all events, after the rescue of her father’s life, and her acquaintance with Mr. Reilly, the prisoner at the bar was rejected with disdain, as he would have been, it seems, if Reilly never had existed. Now, gentlemen I of the jury,