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From The Cornhill Magazine.
THE STATE TRIALS.

speare. The purpose of playing is, as that excellent authority is constantly brought to us, to show the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure. But, upon that hypothesis, why should we not see the age itself instead of being bothered by impossible kings and queens and ghosts mixed up in supernatural catastrophes? If this theory of art be sound, is not the most realistic historian the only artist? Nay, since every historian is more or less a sophisticator, should we not go back to the materials from which histories are made?

IT sometimes strikes readers of books that literature is, on the whole, a snare and a delusion. Writers, of course, do not generally share that impression; and, on the contrary, have said a great many fine things about the charm of conversing with the choice minds of all ages, with the innuendo, to use the legal phrase, that they themselves modestly demand some place amongst the aforesaid choice minds. But at times we are disposed to retort upon our teachers. Are you not, we observe, exceedingly given to humbug? The youthful student takes the poet's ecstasies and agonies in solemn earnest. We who have grown a little wiser cannot forget how complacently delighted the poet has been to hit upon a new agony; how he has set it to a pretty tune; how he has treasured up his sorrows and despairs to make his literary stock in trade, has taken them to market, and squabbled with publishers and writhed under petty critics, and purred and bridled under judicious flattery; and we begin to resent his demand upon our sympathies. Are not poetry and art a terrible waste of energy in a world where so much energy is already being dissipated? The great musician, according to the well-worn anec dote, hears the people crying for bread in the street, and the wave of emotion passing through his mind comes out in the shape, not of active benevolence, but of some new and exquisite jangle of sounds. It is all very well. The musician, as is probable enough, could have done nothing better. But there are times when we feel that we would rather have the actual sounds, the downright utterance of an agonized human being, than the far-away echo of passion set up in the artistic brain. We prefer the roar of the tempest to the squeaking of the eolian harp. We tire of the skilfully prepared sentiment, the pretty fancies, the unreal imaginations, and long for the harsh, crude, substantial studying human nature. But you might fact, the actual utterance of men struggling in the dire grasp of unmitigated realities. We want to see nature itself, not to look at the distorted images presented in the magical mirror of a Shake

I feel some touch of sympathy for those simple-minded readers who avowedly prefer the police reports to any other kind of literature. There at least they come into contact with solid facts; shocking, it may be, to well-regulated minds, but possessing all the charm of their brutal reality; not worked into the carefully doctored theories and rose-colored pictures set forth by the judicious author, whose real aim is to pose as an amiable and interesting being. It is true that there are certain objections to such studies. They generally imply a wrong state of mind in the student. He too often reads, it is to be feared, with that pleasure in loathsome details which seems to spring from a survival of the old cruel instincts capable of finding pleasure in the sight of torture and bloodshed. Certainly one would not, even in a passing phrase, suggest that the indulgence of such a temper can be anything but loathsome. But it is not necessary to assume this evil propensity in all cases; or what must be our judgment of the many excellent members of society who studied day by day the reports of the Tichborne case, for example, and felt that there was a real blank in their lives when the newspapers had to fill their columns with nothing better than discussions of international relations and social reforms? You might perhaps laugh at such a man if he asserted that he was conscientiously

give him credit if he replied that he was reading a novel which atoned for any defects of construction by the incomparable interest of reality. And the reply would be more plausible in defence of an

other kind of reading. When literature The charm of the State trials is in the palls upon me I sometimes turn for relief singular fulness and apparent authenticity to the great collection of State trials. of many of the reports of viva voce exThey are nothing, you may say, but the aminations. There are not more links police reports of the past. But it makes between us, for example, and Sir Nichoall the difference that they are of the past. las Throgmorton whose words I have 1 be ashamed of myself when I read just quoted — than between us and the may some hideous revelation of modern crime, last witness at a contemporary trial. The not to stimulate my ardor as a patriot and very words are given fresh from the speaka reformer, but to add a zest to my com-er's mouth. The volumes of course confortable chair in the club window or at tain vast masses of the dismal materials the bar of my favorite public house. But which can be quarried only by the paI can read without such a pang of remorse tience of a Dryasdust. If we open them about Charles I. and the regicides. I can at random we may come upon reading do nothing for them. I cannot turn the which is anything but exhilarating. There tide of battle at Naseby, or rush into the are pages upon pages of constitutional streets with the enthusiastic Venner. eloquence in the Sacheverell case about They make no appeal to me for help, and the blessed Revolution, and the social I have not to harden my heart by resist- compact and the theory of passive resisting, but only for a sympathy which cannot ance, which are as hopelessly unreadable be wasted because it could not be turned as the last Parliamentary debate in the to account. I may indulge in it, for it Times. If we chance upon the great case strengthens the bond between me and my of ship-money, and the arguments for and ancestors. My sense of relationship is against the immortal Hampden, we have stimulated and strengthened as I gaze at to dig through strata of legal antiquathe forms sinking slowly beyond my grasp rianism solid enough to daunt the most down into the abyss of the past, and try intrepid explorer. And, as trials expand in imagination to raise them once more in later times, and the efforts of the to the surface. I do all that I can for British barrister to establish certain imthem in simply acknowledging that they portant rules of evidence become fully form a part of the great process in which reported, we, as innocent laymen, feel I am for the instant on the knife-edge of bound to withdraw from the sacred place. actual existence, and unreal only in the Indeed, one is forced to ask in passing sense in which the last motion of my pen whether any English lawyer, with one exis unreal now. "I was once," says one ception, ever made a speech in court of the earliest performers, "a looker-on which it was possible for any one, not a of the pageant as others be here now, but lawyer, to read in cold blood. Speeches, now, woe is me! I am a player in that of course, have been made beyond numdoleful tragedy." This "now" is become ber of admirable efficacy for the persuaOur once," ," and we may leave it to the sion of judges and juries; but so far as harmless enthusiasts who play at meta the State trials inform us, one can only physics to explain or to darken the mean- suppose that lawyers regarded eloquence ing of the familiar phrase. Whatever as a deadly sin, perhaps because jurymen. time may be· a point, I believe, not had a kind of dumb instinct which led quite settled there is always a singular them to associate eloquence with humbug. fascination in any study which makes us The one exception is Erskine, whose vividly conscious of its ceaseless lapse, speeches are true works of art, and perand gives us the sense of rolling back fect models of lucid, logical exposition.. the ever-closing scroll. Historians, espe- The strangely inarticulate utterance of cially of the graphic variety, try to do his brethren reconciles us in a literary that service for us; but we can only get sense to the rule outrageous in a moral the full enjoyment by studying at first and political point of view - - which for hand direct contemporary reports of act- centuries forbade the assistance of counual words and deeds. sel in the most serious cases. In the

1

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view we may certainly prefer the old sys. tem, for the tragedies generally have a

den interventions of a benevolent author, which are meant to save our feelings at the end of a modern novel, we are generally thrilled by a scene on the scaffold, in which it is rare indeed for the actors to play their parts unworthily.

older trials, therefore, we assist at a se-
ries of tragedies, which may shock our
sense of justice, but in their rough-and-worthy ending; and instead of those sud-
ready fashion go at once to the point and
show us all the passions of human beings
fighting in deadly earnest over the issues
of life and death. The unities of time
and place are strictly observed. In the
good old days the jury, when once empan-
elled, had to go on to the end. There The most interesting period of the
was no dilatory adjourning from day to State trials is perhaps the last half of
day. As wrestlers who have once taken the seventeenth century, when the art of
hold must struggle till one touches earth, reporting seems to have been sufficiently
the prisoner had to finish his agony there developed to give a minute verbal record
and then. The case might go on by can- - vivid as a photograph― of the actual
dle-light, and into the early hours of a scene, and before the interest was diluted
second morning, till even the spectators, by floods of legal rhetoric. Pepys him-
wedged together in the close court, with self does not restore the past more viv-
a pestilential atmosphere, loaded, if they idly than do some of those anonymous
had only known it, with the germs of gaol reporters. The records indeed of the
fever, were well-nigh exhausted; till the trials give the fullest picture of a social
judge confessed himself too faint to sum period, which is too often treated from
up, and even to recollect the evidence; some limited point of view. The great
till the unfortunate prisoner, browbeaten | political movements of the day leave their
by the judge and the opposite counsel, mark upon the trials; the last struggle of
bewildered by the legal subtleties, often
surprised by unexpected evidence, and
unable to produce contradictory witnesses
at the instant, overwhelmed with all the
labor and impossibility of a task to which
he was totally unaccustomed, could only
stammer out a vague assertion of inno-
cence. Here and there some sturdy
prisoner a Throgmorton or a Lilburne
thus brought to bay under every disad-
vantage, managed to fight his way through,
and to persuade a jury to let him off even
at their own peril. As time goes on,
things get better, and the professions of
fair play have more reality; but it is also
true that the performance becomes less
exciting. In the degenerate eighteenth
century it came to be settled that a minis-
ter might be turned out of office without
losing his head; and it is perhaps only
from an æsthetic point of view that the
old practice was better, which provided
historians with so many moving stories
of judicial tyranny. But in that point of

In the trial of Horne Tooke in 1794 it was decided
by the judges that an adjourninent might take place in

case of "physical necessity," but the only previous
case of an adjournment cited was that of Canning (in
1753).

parties was fought out by judges and juries with whatever partiality in open court. We may start, if we please, with the "memorable scene" in which Charles I. won his title to martyrdom; then comes the gloomy procession of regicides; and presently to come we have the martyrs to the Popish plot, and they are followed by the Whig martyr, Russell, and by the miserable victims who got the worst of Sedgemoor fight. The Church of England has its share of interest in the exciting case of the seven bishops; and Nonconformists are represented by Baxter's sufferings under Jeffreys, and by luckless frequenters of prohibited conventicles; and beneath the more stirring events described in different histories, we have strange glimpses of the domestic histories which were being transacted at the time; there are murderers and forgers and housebreakers, who cared little for Whig or Tory; superstition is represented by an occasional case of witchcraft. And we have some curious illustrations of the manners and customs of the fast young men of the period, the dissolute noblemen, the "sons of Belial flown with insolence and wine," who disturbed Milton's