The obtuser sense truth fails to satisfy;
Now, moved, from pathos at the wrong endured,
Also his tongue at times is hard to curb;
Incisive, nigh satiric bites the phrase.
And never once does he detach his eye
From those ranged there to slay him or to save,
But does his best man's-service for himself."
His speech is a tissue of falsehoods and prevarications: if he uses a fact, it is only to twist it into a form of self-justification. He knows it is useless to deny the murder; his aim, then, is to explain and excuse it. Every device attainable by the instinct and the brain of hunted humanity he finds and uses. Now he slurs rapidly over an inconvenient fact; now, with the frank audacity of innocence, proclaims and blazons it abroad; now he is rhetorically eloquent, now ironically pathetic; always contriving to shift the blame upon others, and to make his own course appear the only one plausible or possible, the only one possible, at least, to a high-born, law-abiding son of the Church. Every shift and twist is subtly adapted to his audience of Churchmen, and the gradation of his pleading no less subtly contrived. No keener and subtler special pleading has ever been written, in verse certainly, and possibly in lawyers' prose; and it is poetry of the highest order of dramatic art.