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Rh silence fell over the whole Court. The Prisoner was called upon for his defence: it was singular what a different sensation to that existing in their breasts the moment before, crept thrillingly through the audience. Hushed was every whisper—vanished was every smile that the late cross-examination had excited; a sudden and chilling sense of the dread importance of the tribunal made itself abruptly felt in the minds of every one present.

Perhaps, as in the gloomy satire of Hogarth, (the moral Mephistophiles of painters,) the close neighbourhood of Pain to Mirth made the former come with the homelier shock to the heart:—be that as it may, a freezing anxiety numbing the pulse—and stirring through the hair, made every man in that various crowd feel a sympathy of awe with his neighbour, excepting only the hardened Judge and the hacknied Lawyers, and one spectator, an idiot, who had thrust himself in with the general press, and stood within a few paces of the Prisoner, grinning unconsciously, and every now and then winking with a glassy eye at some one at a distance, whose vigilance he had probably eluded.