Sir Jasper Carew: His Life and Experience

by Charles James Lever

I can more easily imagine a man being able to preserve the memory of all his sensations during some tremendous operation of surgery than to recall the varied tortures of his mind in the progress of a long and eventful trial. Certain incidents will impress themselves more powerfully than others, not always those of the deepest importance,—far from it; the veriest trifles—a stern look of the presiding judge, a murmur in the court—will live in the recollection for long years after the great events of the scene; and a casual glance, a half-uttered word, become texts of sorrow for many a day to come.

I could myself be better able to record my sensations throughout a long fever than tell of the emotions which I suffered in the three days of that trial. I awake occasionally from a dream full of every circumstance all sharply defined, clear, and distinct. My throbbing temples and moist brow evidence the agonies I have gone through; my nerves still tingle with the torture; but with the first moments of wakefulness the memory is gone!—the sense of pain alone remains; but the cause fades away in dim indistinctness, and my heart throbs with gratitude at last to know it was but a dream, and has passed away.

But there are days, too, when all these memories are revived; and I could recount, even to the slightest circumstance, the whole progress of the case, from the moment when a doorkeeper drew aside a heavy curtain to let me pass into the court, to the dreadful instant when—But I cannot go on; already are images and forms crowding around me. To continue this theme would be to call up spirits of torture to the bedside, or the lonely chamber where, friendless and solitary, I sit as I write these lines.

I owe it to him whose patience and sympathy may have carried him so far as my listener, to complete this much of the story of my life; happily a few words will now suffice to do so.

A newspaper of “Old Dublin,” a great authority in those days, the “Morning Advertiser,” informed its readers on a certain day of February that the interesting events of a recent trial should be its apology for any deficiency in its attention to foreign news, or even the domestic occurrences of the country, since the editor could not but participate in the intense anxiety felt by all classes of his fellow-citizens in the progress of one of the most remarkable cases ever submitted before a jury.

After a brief announcement of the trial, he proceeds:

“Mr. Foxley opened the plaintiff's case, in the absence of Serjeant Hanchett; and certainly even the distinguished leader of the Western Circuit never exceeded in clearness, accuracy, or close reasoning the admirable statement then delivered,—a statement which, while supported by a vast variety of well-known incident, may yet vie with romance for the strangeness of the events it records.

“Probably, with a view of enlisting public sympathy in his client's behalf, not impossibly also to give a semblance of consistency to a narrative wherein any individual incident might have startled credulity, the learned counsel gave a brief history of the claimant from his birth; and certainly a stranger tale it would be hard to conceive. Following all the vicissitudes of fortune, fighting to-day in the ranks of the revolutionists in Paris, we find him to-morrow the bearer of important despatches from crowned heads to the members of the exiled family of France. Ever active, ever employed, and ever faithful to his trust, this extraordinary youth became mixed up with great events, and conversant with great people everywhere. If a consciousness that he was a man of birth, and with just claims to station and property, often sustained him in moments of difficulty, there were also times when this thought suggested his very saddest reflections. He saw himself poor, and almost unfriended; he knew the scarcely passable barriers the law erects against all pretenders, whatever the justice of their demands; he was aware that his adversary would have all the benefit which vast resources and great wealth can command. No wonder, then, if he felt faint-hearted and dispirited! Another and a very different train of reasoning may, possibly, have also had its influence on his mind.

“This boy grew up to manhood in the midst of all the startling theories of the French Revolution. He had imbibed the doctrines of equality and universal brotherhood; he had been taught that a state was a family, and its population were the children, amongst whom no inequality of condition should prevail. To sue for the restitution of his own was, then, but a sorry recognition of the principles he professed. The society of the time enjoined the theory that property was a mere usurpation; and I say it is by no means improbable that, educated in such opinions, he should have deemed the prosecution of such a suit a direct falsification of his professions. The world, however, changed.

“After the Revolution came the reaction of order. To the guillotine succeeded the court-martial; then the Consulate, then the Empire. All the external forms of society underwent a less change than did the very nature of men themselves.