"_Poor_ Mr. ----, only think of him, _poor_ fellow! How very
odd! I believe he was not in joke. He told me a distant connection of
his, of another name, whom he never knew till after he heard that the
thing happened, who had been transported to New South Wales a matter of
sixteen years ago, is to be hanged to-morrow, by way of a secondary
punishment, for coming back from transportation."
The audience were profuse in their repetition of the epithet--generous
to excess in the free gift of it to Mr. ----. They did not happen to
consider it applicable to him who, for an unlawful love of native
country, was to undergo a violent and disgraceful death.
This, to be sure, might be attributed to the feeling that so many good
regular people have, that it is highly blameable to pity any man who
suffers capitally for a breach of the law; that it would be, in some
sort, to question the justice of the laws themselves. And the ten or
a dozen honest souls that formed the company were probably so good
themselves as to be justly scandalized at the notion of holding so much
communion with guilt, as to sympathize with it in its sufferings. But
I believe, after all, it was rather a flow of idiom than an effort of
principle.
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