As it occupied four hours in the delivery, of which by far the
greater part was taken up in recapitulating and sifting evidence
with which the careful reader, if such there be, has already been
made too intimately acquainted, the account of it here shall be
very short. The nature of circumstantial evidence was explained,
and the truth of much that had been said in regard to such evidence
by Mr. Chaffanbrass admitted;--but, nevertheless, it would be
impossible,--so said his lordship,--to administer justice if guilt
could never be held to have been proved by circumstantial evidence
alone. In this case it might not improbably seem to them that the
gentleman who had so long stood before them as a prisoner at the
bar had been the victim of a most singularly untoward chain of
circumstances, from which he would have to be liberated, should he
be at last liberated, by another chain of circumstances as singular;
but it was his duty to inform them now, after they had heard what he
might call the double evidence, that he could not have given it to
them as his opinion that the charge had been brought home against the
prisoner, even had those circumstances of the Bohemian key and of the
foreign bludgeon never been brought to light.
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