Page:English laws for women in the nineteenth century.djvu/180

168 Ah! how often, in the course of this session—in the course of this year,—will the same men, who read this appeal with a strong adverse prejudice, he roused by some thought in a favorite author; struck by some noble anecdote; touched. by some beautiful pageant of human feeling, seen among glittering lights from a side-box; chaunted perhaps in a foreign tongue! And yet I have an advantage over these—for my history is real. I know there is no poetry in it to attract you. In the last act of this weary life of defamation, I went down in a hack-cab—to take part in an ignoble struggle—in a dingy little court of justice—where I was insulted by a vulgar lawyer—with questions framed to imply every species of degradation. There was none of the "pomp and circumstance" of those woes that affect you, when some faultless and impossible heroine makes you dream of righting all the wrongs in the world! But faulty as I may be—and prosaic and unsympathised with, as my position might then be—it was ; and unjust because your laws prevent justice! Let that thought haunt you, through the music of your Somnambulas and Desdemonas, and be with you in your readings of histories and romances, and your criticisms on the jurisprudence of countries less free than our own. I really wept and suffered in my early youth—for wrong done, not by me, but to me—and the ghost of whose scandal is raised against me this day. I really suffered the extremity of earthly shame without deserving it (whatever chastisement my other faults may have deserved from heaven). I really lost my young children—craved for them, struggled for them, was barred from them,—and came too late to see one who had died a painful and convulsive death, except in his coffin. I really have gone through much that, if it were invented, would move you,—but being of your every-day world, you are willing it should sweep past like a heap of dead leaves on the stream of time, and take its place with other things that have gone drifting down,—