Page:Wit, humor, and Shakspeare. Twelve essays (IA cu31924013161223).pdf/219

 involving testimony, it is not deliberately weighed, its intricacies patiently pursued, its implications as well as its statements justly rated, and all the parts of it fitted to an opinion of innocence or guilt; but there results instead a state of feeling from previous opinions and assumptions, which no testimony, however strong, can do much to reverse. Women, indeed, naturally shrink from familiarity with the testimony, and do not wish to reach an opinion by probing it. The defendant may enjoy the immunity of a woman's assumption that the charge is in his case incredible, and refuted by all her previous associations with his life; or he may suffer from her want of any feeling derived from previous knowledge of his life, or from considerations dependent upon personal sentiment.

Woman's instinct of purity is specially intolerant towards the unfortunate members of her own sex. She will not hear a word: she is deprived of the power to weigh circumstance, environment, the complicity of others, the wile and treachery of life. The outcast does not even have the benefit of a trial. No court is held in which mercy seasons justice, like one that was long ago extemporized over the woman who knelt on the pavement of the Temple. The men in that crowd were chiefly interested to convict the Master, and not the sinner. If women were present, as is quite probable, they composed a jury that was adverse to the ruling of the court, unless they fell into sympathy from pique at the mock chastity of the men.

In the first scene of the "Midsummer Night's Dream,"