MARCH 17. (Sunday.)
The Cornwall Chronicle informs us, that, at the Montego Bay assizes, a man was tried on the Monday, for assaulting, while drunk, an officer who had served with great distinction, and calling him a coward; for which offence he was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment and fine of £100; and on the Tuesday the same man brought an action against another person for calling him a “drunken liar,” for which he was awarded £1000 for damages! A plain man would have supposed two such verdicts to be rather incompatible; but one lives to learn.
I remember to have read the case of a French nobleman, who was accused of impotence by his wife before the Parliament of Paris, and by a farmer’s daughter for seduction and getting her with child before the Parliament of Rouen; he thought himself perfectly sure of gaining either the one cause or the other: but, however, he was condemned in both. Certainly the poor Frenchman had no luck in matters of justice.
To make the matter better, in the present instance, the man was a clergyman; and his cause of quarrel against the officer was the latter’s refusal to give him a puncheon of rum to christen all his negroes in a lump.