Mr. Barlow (to the defendant)—Do you wish to say any thing for yourself in addition to this affidavit?
The Defendant.—No, Sir.
Mr. Marryatt now addressed their Lordships in the manner following:—
My Lords,—The less I call jour attention to the nature of the offence imputed to the defendant, I think it will be the better. I shall merely direct your attention to the character and situation of the defendant; for when a man in his situation of assumed piety, makes it the mask for extraordinary delinquency, I submit to your Lordships that he becomes an object for extraordinary punishment.
Your Lordships have found by the report, and also by the affidavit of the defendant himself, that reports of a similar description against his character had gone abroad. I do not know what those reports precisely were, and I do not mean anything further by alluding to them, than to state what Mr. Patrick said to him on this occasion, namely, that he should think himself at liberty to believe all that had been previously said against him.
The defendant complains in his affidavit of the popular opprobrium excited against him, by various publications of his trial, and other matters relative to him. It is really almost impossible to check the public feeling in cases of this nature, and nothing is imputed in this affidavit either to the prosecutor or any person connected with the prosecution. They are not responsible for the marrow-bones and cleavers, for the effigy, or for any of the publications.
I should observe, that although the prosecutor did not go before the Magistrate at the very period when this occurred, yet he did not make the least concealment of the story in any way; for it appears, by the testimony of Mr. Thomas, that it had reached his ears in two or three days after it had happened, and that he went and called on Church on the 9th of October. It appears that the matter became perfectly notorious; because, in a very few days afterwards, this letter was written to him by Mrs. Hunter, which notified to him that she would no longer be one of his hearers.
There is only one circumstance in that letter to which I will advert. He states, that he is a child of peculiar Providence, corrected by the hand of the Almighty, who will resent every attempt to correct his offences from any other quarter. I do not think that your Lordship will intimidated from administering to him a due portion of punishment for his offence, by any such intimation as that letter holds out.
Mr. Justice Bayley then addressed the defendant as follows:—The painful part of my duty is, to pass on you the sentence of this Court, for the enormous crime of which you stand convicted. It is not only painful when I think that you are so far advanced in years, and that you were in a situation which it became your bounden duty to reflect on what would become of you, as well as others, hereafter, but also when I reflect, that when it was your duty to guide the course of others through life, you took advantage of the confidence reposed in you, to put young people materially off their guard, who would expect, from your sanctity of manners, that nothing was to be feared.
Your attempt, in this instance, was upon a lad, very young, and if he had been once drawn into the commission of that offence, which you attempted to commit on him, though young, what must have been the consequence? What course of life would he not be afterwards induced to follow by you?