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 XXVII

THE PERORATION

"It is too much the custom, my friends," Northcote continued to the jury when Mr. Weekes had sat down as spasmodically as he had got up, "to regard this divine mystic of whom I have spoken as a supernatural being whose name can only be mentioned with propriety in the presence of an elaborate ritual. That fetish dies hard, my friends, but dying it is, for if ever a human being walked this earth, whose life and opinions are a great poem that deserves to be recited in our bosoms and our businesses during every hour that we dwell, it is the life and opinions of him who has already given his verdict in this case. There are very few things that are of any importance to us upon which we have not his pronouncement in one form or another; and though that pronouncement may not always be coincident with the technical lawyer's law of the time, which is understanded of no man, least of all of themselves, these obiter dicta of his, delivered upon the spur of the occasion, have already outlasted kings, dynasties, and nations; and they are likely to endure when court-houses, jury-boxes, and scaffolds have long ceased to be.

"A few centuries ago such words as I am now addressing to you would have sent me to the lions, and you also would have been torn in pieces for having deigned to listen to them. It is not a hun