Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 69, No. 427, May, 1851

Are but extended Man, in life, and heart, and will.

Your eye still shifting to the setting sun,
The diamond drops upon the glistening thorns
Are topazes and emeralds by turns;
Twinkling they shake, and aye they tremble into one.

Clouds press the sinking orb: he strikes a mist
Of showery purple on the forest tops,
The western meadows, and the skirting slopes;
Down comes the stream a lapse of living amethyst.

Beauty for man, O glory! yet how vain,
Were there no higher love to correspond,
Lifting us up, our little time beyond,
Up from the dust of death, up to God's face again.

The Word apart: Nature ne'er made, in whim,
An organ but for use: our longing hope
Of life immortal, like our hand, has scope
To grasp the things which are: that life is thus no dream.

We tread on legends all this storied land:
Here flows a ferry through the mountains black
With pinewood galleries far withdrawing back;
Man's heart is also here, and dwarfs those summits grand:

The virgin martyrs, half the ferry o'er,
By ruthless men were plunged into the tide,
Singing their holy psalm; away it died,
Bubbling in death. The moon a blood-red sorrow wore.

And aye, they tell, when, wan and all forlorn,
Sickening she looks upon our world of wrong,
And would be gone for ever, far along
The mournful ferry dim that dying psalm is borne.

Yon peasant swarth, his day of labour done,
Pipes at his cottage door; his wife sits by,
Dancing their baby to the minstrelsy:
To temperate gladness they their sacred right have won.

Rest after toil, sweet healing after pain;
Repent, and so be loved, O stubborn-viced —
The Tishbite girt severe runs before Christ:
Such is the double law complete to mortal men.

Yon lordly pine bends his complying head
To eve's soft breath, and the stupendous cloud
Shifts silently: Man's world is fitliest bowed
By power when gently used: Force not, love thou instead.

One cool green gleam on yonder woodland high,
And day retires; grey twilight folds with dew
The hooded flowers; in gulfs of darkening blue
The starry worlds come out to Contemplation's eye.

Home now to sleep. No part in all man's frame
But has its double uses, firm to keep,
Help this, round that, and beautify: of sleep,
Complex of sweet designs, how finely 'tis the same.

Touched with the solemn harmonies of night,
Down do we lie our spirits to repair,
And, fresh ourselves, make morning fresh and fair;
Sleep too our Father gave to soften death's affright:

In sleep we lapse and lose ourselves away,
And thus each night our death do we rehearse.
O, at the last may we the oblivion pierce
Of death, as aye of sleep, and rise unto the day.

MODERN STATE TRIALS.[10 - Modern State Trials: Revised and Illustrated, with Essays and Notes. By William C. Townsend, Esq., M.A., Q.C., Recorder of Macclesfield. In 2 vols. 8vo. Longman Co., 1850.]

PART V. – THE ROMANCE OF FORGERY —Concluded

"Alexander Humphreys, or Alexander, pretending to be Earl of Stirling," said Lord Meadowbank,[11 - The duty here performed by the President of the Court is in England discharged by an officer of the Court called the Clerk of Arraigns.] addressing his prisoner, on his being first placed at the bar, "you have been served with an indictment charging you with the crimes of forgery, and of feloniously using and uttering as genuine, certain documents therein described, and alleged to have been forged and fabricated, you knowing them to be so. Are you guilty, or not guilty?"

"Not guilty, my Lord," replied the prisoner, standing beside his friend Colonel D'Aguilar. But now occurs the question – how was he to be tried? – as a peer of Scotland, or as a commoner? If as a peer, the court before whom he stood was incompetent to try him; for he was entitled, by the Treaty of Union, as a peer of Scotland, to be tried as peers of Great Britain are tried – viz., in the Court of the Lord High Steward; and the mode of procedure is that prescribed in 1825 by Statute 6 Geo. iv. c. 66, which required the Scottish judges to be summoned and to sit with the English judges, and according to the law of Scotland, [pp. 5, 6.] This privilege, however, as will be presently seen, the prisoner waived. Then came another question: was he to be tried as a "landed man?" – by which is meant a landed proprietor. It is a very ancient privilege of landed men, by the Scotch law, that they should be tried only by their peers —i. e., their brother landed proprietors. In process of time, however, this right has been so far modified as to entitle the prisoner to a majority only of his landed brethren. This right also, as will shortly be seen, the prisoner waived – having probably no pretence to the possession of any lands in Scotland, except such as he claimed as Earl of Stirling. To meet any possible difficulty, however, on this score, two lists of assize had been prepared – respectively consisting of "landed men" and common jurors, and "special jurors" and common Jurors: the former to be adopted "if the said Alexander Humphreys claimed, and was entitled to, the privilege of a landed man;" the latter, "if he did not claim, or was not entitled to, the privilege of a landed man."

After the prisoner had pleaded not guilty, the clerk in court read aloud the defences which, according to the procedure in Scotland, had been lodged in court for the prisoner, signed by his two counsel. They were entitled "Defences for Alexander Alexander, Earl of Stirling,[12 - This was subsequently altered to "claiming to be Earl of Stirling." – Swinton, p. 48.] against the indictment at the instance of her Majesty's Advocate."

These Defences were comprised in two paragraphs. The first stated that, as Lord Cockburn's interlocutor, though not final, had decided against the prisoner's claim to be the heir of the Earl of Stirling,[13 - Ante, p. 477 et seq.] "he was advised that he was not in a condition to plead the privilege of peerage; but was bound to acknowledge the competency of that court to proceed under the indictment before it." The second proceeded thus: —

"The panel pleads not guilty of the libel generally; and, even particularly, he denies that he had the slightest ground to suspect that all, or any, of the documents libelled on were forged or fabricated. He produced them under legal advice, in the belief of their being genuine, and useful for the support of his interest."

"A third paragraph consisted of an application to postpone the trial, on the ground that the prisoner was not prepared for it, as one of his counsel and his agent had gone to London and Paris to make inquiry as to several of the witnesses for the Crown, and such further investigation as might be necessary for his defence." The words which we have placed in italics indicate a course of procedure altogether at variance with that adopted at the English bar.

As soon as their Defences had been read, the prisoner's counsel rose and said, "My lords, I do not mean to claim for the panel the privilege of a landed man; nor do we intend to state any objections to the relevancy of the indictment." By "relevancy" (a technical term in Scotch law) is signified "the justice and sufficiency of the matters stated in the indictment to warrant a decree in the terms asked;"[14 - Bell's Dictionary of the Law of Scotland, p. 844. In civil cases this rule is reversed. —Id. ib.] and, according to the criminal law of Scotland, this objection must be taken, if at all, before the trial. If it be not, the prisoner cannot make it the subject of arrest of judgment by the court, but must refer it to the law advisers of the Crown, after the sentence has been pronounced by them, to have such weight attached to it as may be deemed proper, with a view to pardon or mitigation of punishment.[15 - Alison's Practice of the Criminal Law of Scotland, p. 651.]

"Let the relevancy of the indictment be determined," said the Solicitor-General, "by your lordships pronouncing the usual interlocutor."

Lord Meadowbank. – "Alexander Humphreys, or Alexander, attend to the interlocutor of the court," which the clerk read as follows: —

"The Lords Commissioners of Justiciary find the libel RELEVANT to infer the pains of law, but allow the panel a proof in exculpation and alleviation; and in respect that the panel has by his counsel waived his right, if he any have, to be tried by a jury, of which the majority shall consist of landed men, remit the panel, with the libel as found relevant, to the knowledge of the ordinary assize."

Lists of all the witnesses and documentary proofs, on both sides, were, as it would appear, interchanged; and the trial having been postponed from the 3d to the 29th April 1839, on the latter day it commenced – not however, as in England, with a preliminary statement on the part of the prosecutor of the course of expected proof, but with the evidence itself in detail. After that on both sides had been adduced, the counsel for the Crown addressed the jury, and then the counsel for the prisoner; after which Lord Meadowbank summed up. We beg to say that we think the English course of procedure greatly preferable to the Scottish, in commencing the trial with a temperate and lucid statement of the case intended to be made out by the Crown, enabling both the Court and the jury – but especially the latter – to obtain an early clue through the labyrinth of oral and documentary proof, to see the drift of it, and appreciate, in going along, the significance of what is being done. In the present case, for instance, the jury were plunged instanter into a series of details of somewhat complicated legal proceedings, and legal and other documents: the Solicitor-General feeling the necessity many times of interposing, to intimate that "the object of this or that evidence was to show so and so," &c. &c. And, indeed, if the jury really saw their way with only middling clearness through the evidence, as it was being adduced, they were a far shrewder and more experienced jury than it has been our lot to see for many a long year, even at Guildhall or Westminster. In the present case, a half-hour's calm preliminary statement, by the Solicitor-General, of the points of the charge, and the application to them of the evidence, would have greatly assisted the jury, possibly even the Court, and, long afterwards, ourselves. In despair, we leaped out of the intricate evidence into the speeches of counsel, and the summing up of the judge, afterwards recurring to the evidence and appendices. At length we found ourselves on sure ground, and in a clear atmosphere; and grudged not the effort we had made to overcome the obstacles of which we have been complaining, and also the difficult technicalities of Scottish criminal law procedure.

It will be recollected that the indictment embraced three distinct classes of alleged forgeries – the excerpt charter of Novodamus, the Le Normand packet, and the De Porquet packet. To establish the "using" and "uttering" of these instruments, evidence was given of their having been adduced, on the part of the prisoner, in the various Scottish courts in which he had from time to time asserted, and endeavoured to maintain his claims. Lord Cockburn's important judgment of the 10th December 1836 was also put in evidence, as were also the examinations of the prisoner, some of his correspondence, and the instruments charged by the indictments to be forgeries. Let us take these latter in their order; and —