"Well, you have seen him—Old Bogle! What do you think of him? Was there ever a better specimen of feigned simplicity than he? 'Bogle,' cries the defendant, after all those years of estrangement, 'is that you?' 'Yes, Sir Roger,' answered Bogle; how do you do?'
"'Do you remember giving me a pipe o' baccy?' asks a poor country greenhorn down at Alresford. 'Yes,' answers the Claimant. 'Then you're the man,' says the greenhorn. Such was the way evidence was manufactured.
"A poor lady—you remember Mrs. Stubbs—had a picture of her great-great-grandfather's great-grandfather. In goes the Claimant, and in his artful manner shows his childhood's memory. 'Ah, Mrs. Stubbs,' says he, looking at another picture, 'that is not the old picture, is it?' (Somebody had put him up to this.) No, sir,' cries Mrs. Stubbs, delighted with his recollection—'no, sir; but please to walk this way into my parlour,' And there, sure enough, was the picture he had been told to ask for.
"'Ah!' he exclaims, 'there it is; there's the old picture!'
"How could Mrs. Stubbs disbelieve her own senses?"
One, Sir Walter Strickland, declined to see the Claimant and be misled, and was roundly abused by the defendant's counsel. One of the jury asked if he was still alive. "Yes," said the Lord Chief Justice, although the defendant expressed a hope that they would all die who did not recognize him….
"In a letter to Rous, my lord, where he said, 'I see I have one enemy the less in Harris's death. Captain Strickland, who made himself so great on the other side, went to stay at Stonyhurst with his brother, and died there. He called on me a week before and abused me shamefully. So will all go some day'—this," said Mr. Hawkins, "was not exhibiting the same Christian spirit which he showed when he said, 'God help those poor purgured sailors!'"
"Why should the defendant," asked Mr. Hawkins at the close of one of the day's speeches, "if he were Sir Roger, avoid Arthur Orton's sisters? Why, would he not have said, 'They will be glad indeed to see me, and hear me tell them about the camp-fire under the canopy of heaven,' as his counsel put it, 'where their brother Arthur told me all about Fergusson, the old pilot of the Dundee boat, who kept the public-house at Wapping, and the Shetland ponies of Wapping, and the Shottles of the Nook at Wapping, and wished me to ask who kept Wright's public-house now, and about the Cronins, and Mrs. MacFarlane of the Globe—all of Wapping.'"
The Judges fell back with laughter, and the curtain came down, for these were the questions with many more the Claimant asked on the evening of his landing.
"I shall attack the noble army of Carabineers," said Mr. Hawkins on another occasion. He did so, and conquered the regiment in detail.