government, and said that the liberty of the press was now in its full vigour in Ireland! That Hevey having assaulted a magistrate in the execution of his duty, the action should have been brought against him-at any rate, sixpence damages was enough for so trifling an offence.* Mr. Plunket followed on nearly the same grounds.

A Mr. Hall, an attorney, was examined on the part of the defendant, of whom he gave a very flattering account; and said that if Hevey had behaved with a proper degree of civility to the major, he had not been sent to the provost. This gentleman's cross-examination by Mr., Curran afforded some amusement to the audience.

Mr. Barrington made an eloquent speech in favour of the plaintiff; our readers will be able to form an idea of its spirit from the following extracts:

I feel, said he, an indispensable duty to speak to this case, as I conceive it to be of the greatest importance, not only to the plaintiff, but to the crown and to the country. The plaintiff has brought his action to recover damages against the defendant for a violation of the law, and an assault upon the constitution. He has brought his case before you with confidence, and calls steadily for justice; not merely to avenge his own wrongs; not with the view of mercenary damages, or a malicious triumph, but he calls for justice against the public officer who has abused the public trust in his person; and in his person has endeavoured to convert the legal autho rity of the crown into a despotic instrument for the subject. My learned friend, Mr. Plunket, has declared sincerely his reluctance to speak to evidence; I am convinced it proceeded from an honest consciousness of a bad cause; which blunts his ingenuity, and flattens his talents, when he is called forth as the reluctant advocate of tyranny or of oppression. I have no such motive to decline speaking to evidence on the part of the plaintiff, and therefore I exercise my duty with

Plaintiff laid his damages at 5,000%.

pleasure as his advocate; and however impossible it is in me to display such splendid talents as my friend Mr. Curran, whose exertions every man must admire, yet, when the topic to be discussed is the liberty of the subject, he must be a slavish advocate indeed, whose energy does not rise in proportion to the importance of the discussion, and call out whatever talents God and nature gave him.

In this case it is only necessary to state the material fact proved, in order to convince an honest jury of their bounden duty. These facts alone will teach you to form a just judgment, whether Ireland is to participate in the liberty of that country to which she is now united; or to plunge back again into the chains and trammels of petty and despotic tyranny— that is the real question. If you, gentlemen of the jury, by your verdict, stamp a justification on the conduct of Major Sirr, Ireland is in bondage; but if your verdict marks that conduct as unjustifiable and illegal, Ireland will regain some traces of the British constitution, and the personal liberty of, the subject will be secured and protected.

I know I now speak before an honest jury, and a wise judge -the eyes of Ireland are fixed on the event of this trialnot as to Hevey or as to Sirr, but as to freedom or as to slavery. For it is fully and unequivocally proved, that Mr. Hevey, a subject, in the king's peace, against whom no public charge remained, and to whom no public crime was then imputed, and against whom no warrant existed, or any pretence of legal detention, was dragged from a public room, in the noon day, as a common felon, and plunged into an infectious dungeon, to enforce a private apology to a private subject, for a private insult, contrary to the spirit of the constitution, the law of the land, and the liberty of the country.

Gentlemen of the jury, could even the gliding shadow of distant liberty light one moment on a country where such an act should be held justifiable? It is not a common assault committed by an ordinary person, on an ordinary occasion, in the common occurrences of error or of violence, where the

damages are measured by the private injury, and the wrongs of the individual are not identified with the general liberty of the country. It is not the case of a false imprisonment of a person in the lower orders of life, by a person of the same description, where the hours of detention measure the proportion of the injury; but it is a public and unwarrantable imprisonment of a respectable brewer of the city of Dublin, by Major Sirr, to gratify the feelings of private passion, under the colour of public duty! Defendant's counsel have dwelt on the past services of the defendant; but, gentlemen, it is a principle foreign and unknown to our constitution, that any person, on any authority, should claim a privilege to commit acts of injury and oppression on his fellow citizens with impunity, for past services, and for which he was so amply rewarded. It is unknown to the moderns-it was unknown to the ancients. The last of the Horatii, though he saved his country, was condemned for the death of his sister; Manlius was flung from the Tarpeian Rock, though he defeated the designs of the Gauls, and saved the capitol of Rome. Yet why should we have recurrence to the pages of ancient history? we have a modern and recent example, and with which the major is better acquainted than with the story of the HoratiiI mean Jemmy O'Brien !-he also defeated the machinations of the Gauls, was the saviour of his country, and preserved our capitol-yet Jemmy received the reward of past services, for he was hanged in this city for murder! His past services could not protect him from the law-he died, and the law triumphed! It is a weak and insolent defence, to say that the defendant's services should warrant his offences-it is absurd to say, that because Major Sirr knew and supported the law in 1798, he should be warranted in overturning his own fabric, and be at liberty to break through both law and constitution in 1801. Because he defended the constitution in time of war, is he to destroy it in time of peace?—and because a rebellion once existed, is a tyrranny to be erected on its ruins? This argument of the defendant's counsel admits my

client's case, because if the defendant's counsel had a better argument, they would certainly have used it. But they had none-the law failed them-justice failed them-and they were obliged to have recourse to finesse, and endeavour to lead away the minds of the jury from the fact in issue, and impose upon their loyalty, when they could not mislead their reason. Defendant's counsel, as another argument, have had recourse to another finesse, equally weak, but more unwarrantable than the former, namely, that the plaintiff, Mr. Hevey, had been a rebel in 1798, and convicted, and sentenced to trans portation; and that, therefore, a personal injury to him, by so meritorious a person as the defendant, should weigh little with the jury. Monstrous assertion! Even if Mr. Hevey had been guilty, which I deny, such a doctrine is most vitious. God forbid that when a subject receives a pardon, and is restored to the bosom of his country, he should remain an outlawed slave in the midst of a free people; on the con/trary, Mr. Hevey was as much under the protection of the law as Major Sirr, and both delicacy and honour, and public policy, should rather have united in making a pardoned man forget that he had offended, than in making that pardoned offence a pretence for his oppression. Such a pretence is an insult to the throne which pardoned-a charge against the lenity of the king-and a crime against the liberty of the subject and, of all the means which human ingenuity could devise, the most effectual means of perpetuating disaffection. But I deny the fact of Mr. Hevey's guilt. In times when it was enough to be suspected to warrant punishment, Mr. Hevey had enemies; he belonged to the persecuted cast, and was charged, of course, with high treason; the minds of all men were inflamed-rebellion raged-blood was familiaranimosity was implacable-and Mr. Hevey was sent to Kilkenny, to be tried by a court-martial for high treason; a reward was offered for any person who would give evidence against him-no creditable witness could be found-no high treason could be proved-yet he was sentenced to seven

years' transportation on the suspicion of high treason, though he must have suffered death if guilty. The proceedings of the court-martial were laid before Lord Cornwallis; he considered them, and, under his sign manual, gave the lie direct to the minutes of that court-martial, ordering Mr. Hevey to be discharged, inasmuch as it appeared that he was not active in the rebellion; and let down the sentence easy, by directing Mr. Hevey to give security, which he did. Mr. He vey was discharged; he betook himself to his industry as a brewer, a man of wealth, and never had any species of offence laid to his charge, till the defendant treated him like a felon in the commercial coffee-room, and, by such treatment, trampled on the justice and humanity of the absent viceroy. Where then lies the guilt of Mr. Hevey? Where' then lies the justification of Major Sirr?-is it in the minutes of the Kilkenny court-martial-or is it in counteracting the royal lenity, or viceroyal justice? No; the whole transaction is to be found in private passion and personal animosity, working on an irritated mind, to commit a most unwarrantable injury.

Gentlemen of the jury, the damages laid in the declaration, even if you find the full amount of them, are inadequate; you will consider the hardships inflicted on the plaintiff, when in the provost prison; till the story of my client became public, I could not have believed it possible, that after all pretence of insurrection had ceased-after having been told that Ireland would have British liberty, when she became united to Britain-I could not have believed it possible that there could have existed in the minds of what is called a free city, a deep, dark, loathsome, and infectious dungeon, boasting all the qualities of Bastiles and Inquisitions-kept by an indivi dual, into which his majesty's peaceable subjects could be plunged without crime, and in which they could be detained by false and fabricated returns of the king's writs, under pretence of state offences. I could not have believed it possible Mr. Hevey could have been so confined, unless the fact had