of life.  There is, my Lords, a nobleness in modesty, while insolence is always base and servile.  A man who is under the accusation of his country is under a very great misfortune.  His innocence, indeed, may at length shine out like the sun, yet for a moment it is under a cloud; his honor is in abeyance, his estimation is suspended, and he stands, as it were, a doubtful person in the eyes of all human society.  In that situation, not a timid, not an abject, but undoubtedly a modest behavior, would become a person even of the most exalted dignity and of the firmest fortitude.

The Romans (who were a people that understood the decorum of life as well as we do) considered a person accused to stand in such a doubtful situation that from the moment of accusation he assumed either a mourning or some squalid garb, although, by the nature of their constitution, accusations were brought forward by one of their lowest magistrates.  The spirit of that decent usage has continued from the time of the Romans till this very day.  No man was ever brought before your Lordships that did not carry the outward as well as inward demeanor of modesty, of fear, of apprehension, of a sense of his situation, of a sense of our accusation, and a sense of your Lordships’ dignity.

These, however, are but outward things; they are, as Hamlet says, “things which a man may play.”  But, my Lords, this prisoner has gone a great deal further than being merely deficient in decent humility.  Instead of defending himself, he has, with a degree of insolence unparalleled in the history of pride and guilt, cast out a recriminatory accusation upon the House of Commons.  Instead of considering himself as a person already under the condemnation of his country, and uncertain whether or not that condemnation shall receive the sanction of your verdict, he ranks himself with the suffering heroes of antiquity.  Joining with them, he accuses us, the representatives of his country, of the blackest ingratitude, of the basest motives, of the most abominable oppression, not only of an innocent, but of a most meritorious individual, who, in your and in our service, has sacrificed his health, his fortune, and even suffered his fame and character to be called in question from one end of the world to the other.  This, I say, he charges upon the Commons of Great Britain; and he charges it before the Court of Peers of the same kingdom.  Had I not heard this language from the prisoner, and afterwards from his counsel, I must confess I could hardly have believed that any man could so comport himself at your Lordships’ bar.

After stating in his defence the wonderful things he did for us, he says,—­“I maintained the wars which were of your formation, or that of others, not of mine.  I won one member of the great Indian confederacy from it by an act of seasonable restitution; with another I maintained a secret intercourse, and converted him into a friend; a third I drew off by diversion and negotiation, and