is too dreadful to be told. It is then humanity has no ears, because humanity has no tongue. It is then the proud man scorns to speak; but, like a physician baffled by the wayward excesses of a dying patient, retires indignantly from the bed of an unhappy wretch, whose ear is too. fastidious to bear the sound of wholesome advice; whose palate is too debauched to bear the salutary bitter of the medicine that might redeem him; and therefore leaves him to the felonious piety of the slaves that talk tohim of life, and strip him before he is cold. I do not wish, gentlemen, to exhaust too much of your attention by following this subject through the last century with much minuteness. But the facts are too recent in your mind not to shew you that the liberty of the press, and the liberty of the people, sink or rise together, and that the liberty of speaking, and the liberty of acting, have shared exactly the same fate."
Appealing to history on the subject of the libel, which was the capital punishment of a Mr. Orr, upon the verdict of a drunken jury, and the speech of the attorney-general -
“Gentlemen, I am not unconscious that the learned counsel for the crown seemed to address you with a confidence of a very different kind from mine. He seemed to expect a kind of respectful sympathy from you with the feelings of the castle and the griefs of chided authority. Perhaps, gentlemen, he may know you better than I do: if he does, he has spoken to you as he ought; he has been right in telling you, that if the reprobation of this is weak, it is because his genius could not make it stronger; he has been right in telling you, that his language has not been braided and festooned as elegantly as it might; that he has not pinched the miserable plaits of his phraseology, nor placed his patches and feathers with that correctness of millinery which became so exalted a person. If you agree with him, gentlemen; if you think the man who ventures, at the hazard of his own life, to rescue from the deep, the drowned honour of his country, must not presume upon the guilty familiarity of
