Page:English laws for women in the nineteenth century.djvu/148

136 day,—when he met me face to face, shivering with the frenzy of mingled anger, shame, and fear, (which he sneered at as "acting")—in that little court where I stood apparently helpless, mortified, and degraded—in that bitterest of many bitter hours in my life,—I judged and sentenced him. I annulled the skill of his Tory lawyer's suggestion to a Tory judge. I over-ruled the decision of Lord Abinger in that obscure and forgotten cause, which upheld him against justice. I sentenced Mr. Norton to be ; which he justly considers as the deepest condemnation. All secresy [sic]—all forbearance—were over, with his false defence. Though I certainly did not anticipate, that, in addition to abuse of the dead and of all family ties, he would, in his reckless anger against Sir John Bayley, himself ruin his own cause by shewing the way in which it had been protected—and slur the very friends who had protected him, by such revelations. "What you state may be true; but, sixteen years ago, Lord Abinger decided that you should never make it known." That is the abridgement of Mr Norton's taunts to Sir John Bayley!

And here I will pause to comment on Mr. Norton's angry deprecation of the means by which these things are not only made known, but proved beyond the possibility of doubt. He says, that neither Sir John Bayley nor even I (who am the sufferer for life by his duplicity), have any right to shew the real truth by reference to his "private letters." Why not? Can there be a greater climax of absurdity, than that any man should come forward and say: "This is a printed, published lie; but you shall not contradict it with my private letters; the lie is public,—but my letters are ' confidential.' You shall for ever hold the proof, but never use it: the openness of an extreme publicity is to attend what I say; but the most profound secresy is to be observed with respect to what I have done." Truly "there is but one step from the sublime to the ridiculous;" and the argument which has dignity in it (that .private confidence should not be broken) sinks into the bur-