Lord Nelson and General Sir Alured Clarke were brought as evidence to character. Lord Nelson said, that he and Colonel Despard had served together on the Spanish Main in 1799, and that he was then a loyal man and a brave officer. Lord Ellenborough strongly charged the jury. He declared that there was no question of law, and that the whole case resolved itself into a question of fact. The jury, after retiring for half an hour, brought in a verdict of guilty.
In a few days after, Despard, with six of his accomplices, were executed in front of the new jail in the Borough. The men were chiefly soldiers whom this wretched criminal had bribed or bewildered into the commission of treason. Despard made a speech on the scaffold, declaring himself innocent, and that he was put to death simply for being a friend to truth, liberty, and justice. How he could have made this declaration after the evidence that had been given, is wholly unintelligible except on the ground of insanity, though of that there was no symptom, except in the design itself. What prompted the design except narrow circumstances, bad habits, and the temptations of a revengeful spirit, was never discovered.
A trial, which exhibited extraordinary talent in the defence, by a counsel hitherto unknown, has attracted an interest still more general, though of a less melancholy order. Peltier, an emigrant, and supposed to be an agent of the French emigrant body, had commenced a periodical work, entitled L'Ambigu; the chief object of which was to attack the policy, person, and conduct of the First Consul of France. His assaults were so pointed, that they were complained of by the French government as libels; and the answer returned was, that the only means which the ministry possessed of punishing such offences, was by the verdict of a jury. The Attorney-general, in opening the case, described the paper. On its frontispiece, was a sphinx with a crown upon its head, the features closely resembling those of Bonaparte. A portion of the paper was devoted to a parody of the harangue of Lepidus against Sylla. It asks the French people, "Why they have fought against Austria, Prussia, Italy, England, Germany, and Russia, if it be not to preserve our liberty and our property, and that we might obey none but the laws alone. And now, this tiger, who dares to call himself the Founder, or the Regenerator of France, enjoys the fruit of your labours as spoil taken from the enemy. This man, sole master in the midst of those who surround him, has ordained lists of proscription, and put in execution banishment without sentence, by which there are punishments for the French who have not yet seen the light. Proscribed families, giving birth out of France to children, oppressed before they are born. In another part, the paper urged to immediate action. It says, "Citizens, you must march, you must oppose what is passing, if you desire that he should not seize upon all that you have. There must be no delays, no useless wishes; reckon only upon yourselves, unless you indeed have the stupidity to suppose that he will abdicate through shame of tyranny that which he holds by force of crime." In another part, he assails the First Consul on the nature of his precautions to secure his power. He charges him with the formation of a troop of Mamelukes, composed of Greeks, Maltese, Arabians, and Copts, "a collection of foreign banditti, whose name and dress, recalling the mad and disastrous Egyptian expedition, should cover him with shame; but who, not speaking our language, nor having any point of contact with our army, will always be the satellites of the tyrant, his mutes, his cut-throats, and his hangmen. The laws, the justice, the finances, the administration; in fine, the liberty and life of the citizens, are all in the power of one man. You see at every moment arbitrary arrests, judges punished for having acquitted citizens, individuals put to death after having been already acquitted by law, sentences and sentences of death extorted from judges by threats. Remains there for men, who would deserve that name, any thing else to do, but to avenge their wrongs, or perish with glory?"
Another portion of this paper contained an ode, in which all things were represented as in a state of convulsion, all shaken by a tremendous storm; but nature, either blind or cruel, sparing the head of the tyrant alone:—still carrying on the parody of the Roman speech, it pronounces that a poniard is the last resource of Rome to rescue herself from a dictator. It asks, is it from a Corsican that a Frenchman must receive his chains? was it to crown a traitor that France had punished her kings? In another, a libel, which traced the rise of Bonaparte, and charged him with the intention of assuming imperial power, concluded in these words:—"Carried on the shield, let him be elected emperor; finally, (and Romulus recalls the thing to mind,) I wish that on the morrow he may have his 'apotheosis.'" This the Attorney-general certainly, with every appearance of reason, pronounced to be a palpable suggestion to put the First Consul to death; as history tells us that Romulus was assassinated.
The defence by Mackintosh was a bold and eloquent performance. He commenced by a spirited animadversion on the Attorney's speech, and then extended his subject into a general defence of the liberty of the press, which he pronounced to be the true object of attack on the part of the First Consul. He followed the history of its suppression through all the states under French influence, and then came to the attempt at its suppression here. He then invoked the jury to regard themselves as the protectors of the freedom of speech on earth, and to rescue his client from the severity of an oppression which threatened the universal slavery of mankind.
This speech has been strongly criticised as one in which the advocate defended himself and his party, while he neglected his client. But the obvious truth is, that unless the suggestion of assassination is defensible, there could be no defence, and unless the laws of nations justify the most violent charges on the character of foreign sovereigns, there could be no justification for the language of the whole paper. Mackintosh evidently took the best course for his cause. He made out of bad materials a showy speech; he turned the public eye from the guilt of the libel to the popular value of the press; where others would have given a dull pleading, he gave a stately romance; where the jury, in feebler hands, would have been suffered to see the facts in their savage nudity, he exhibited them clothed in classic draperies, and dazzled the eye with the lofty features and heroic attitudes of ancient love of country. All the skill of man could not have saved Peltier from a verdict of guilty; but the genius of the orator invested his sentence with something of the glory of martyrdom. The breaking out of the war relieved Peltier from the consequences of the verdict. But there can be no question that, if he had been thrown into prison, he would have been an object of the general sympathy; that the liberty of the press would have been regarded as in some degree involved in his sufferings; that he would have found public liberality willing to alleviate his personal and pecuniary difficulties; and that his punishment would have been shortened, and his fine paid by the zeal of the national sympathy. Such are the triumphs of eloquence. Such is the value of having a man of genius for an advocate. Such is the importance to the man of genius himself, of resolving to exert his highest powers for his client. Mackintosh has been called an indolent man; and he has been hitherto but little known. But he has at last discovered his own faculties, and he has only to keep them in action to achieve the highest successes of the bar; to fill the place of Erskine; and if no man can make Erskine forgotten, at least make him unregretted. This speech also has taught another lesson, and that lesson is, that the bar can be the theatre of the highest rank of eloquence, and that all which is regarded as the limit of forensic excellence, is a gratuitous degradation of its own dignity. The sharp retort, the sly innuendo, the dexterous hint, the hard, keen subtlety, the rough common sense, all valuable in their degree, and all profitable to their possessor, are only of an inferior grade. Let the true orator come forth, and the spruce pleader is instantly flung into the background. Let the appeal of a powerful mind be made to the jury, and all the small address, and practical skill, and sly ingenuity, are dropped behind. The passion of the true orator communicates its passion; his natural richness of conception fills the spirit of his hearers; his power of producing new thoughts and giving new shapes to acknowledged truths; his whole magnificence of mind erecting and developing new views of human action as it moves along, lead the feelings of men in a willing fascination until the charm is complete. But after such a man, let the mere advocate stand up, and how feebly does his voice fall on the ear, how dry are his facts, how tedious his tricks, how lacklustre, empty, and vain are his contrivances to produce conviction!
Mackintosh wants one grand quality for the jury,—he speaks like one who thinks more of his argument than of his audience; he forgets the faces before him, and is evidently poring over the images within. Though with a visage of the colour, and seemingly of the texture of granite, he blushes at a misplaced word, and is evidently sensitive to the error of a comma. No man ever spoke with effect who cannot hesitate without being overwhelmed, blunder without a blush, or be bewildered by his own impetuosity, without turning back to retrace. En avant is the precept for the orator, as much as it is the principle of the soldier. Mackintosh has to learn these things; but he has a full mind, a classic tongue, and a subtle imagination, and these constitute the one thing needful for the orator, comprehend all, and complete all.
The late Lord Orford, the relative of the well-known Horace Walpole, is one of the curious evidences that every man who takes it into his head to be conspicuous, right or wrong, may make for himself a name. Lord Orford, while his relative was writing all kinds of brilliant things, collecting antiquities, worshipping the genius of cracked china, and bowing down before fardingales and topknots of the time of Francis I., in the Temple of Strawberry Hill, was forming a niche for his fame in his dog-kennel, and immortalizing himself by the help of his hounds. Next to Actæon, he was the greatest dog-fancier that the world has ever seen, and would have rivalled Endymion, if Diana was to be won by the fleetest of quadrupeds. He was boundless in his profusion in respect of his favourite animals, until at last, finding that his ideas of perfection could not be realized by any living greyhounds, he speculated on the race unborn, and crossed his dogs until, after seven summers, he brought them to unrivalled excellence. He had at various times fifty brace of greyhounds, quartering them over every part of his county Norfolk, of which he was lord-lieutenant, probably for the sake of trying the effect of air and locality.