Nelly, to-day, with arm in mine,
        Said "Yes" to my fond prayer;
    And now the meadows seem all flowers
        Around dear Castle Clare.

ENGLISH AND IRISH JURIES.

ONE or two remarkable verdicts returned to
astonished courts lately in Ireland, may set us
profitably inquiring into some of the peculiarities
of what is correctly called the Palladium of
British liberty; although that term does not, at
the present time, appear to apply to Irish liberty.

The earliest record we have of a jury trial
was in the reign of William the Norman, in the
county court of Kent, when a question of right
as to land having arisen between Gundulph,
Bishop of Rochester, who claimed it for the
Church, and Pichet, sheriff of the shire,
representing the king, it was submitted to the
judgment of twelve men on their oaths. Trial by
jury is subsequently referred to in Magna Charta
as one of the bulwarks of our liberties. In very
early times the verdict of eleven in case of
disagreement was taken, and the refractory juror
sent to jail; but, in the reign of Edward the
Third, it was settled that the verdict of less
than twelve was a nullity, and the court
declared that the judge of assize ought to carry
the jury about with him in a cart until they
agreed. As a means of accelerating unanimity,
juries were, in later times, deprived of light, fire,
food, and drink. Indeed, this practice, which
we fear justified, in his day, the expression of
Pope—

    And wretches hang that jurymen may dine—

to a certain extent still prevails. Within a very
few years a special jury at Salisbury, who were
locked up in very cold weather, having
succeeded in striking a light, sent a message to the
court that they had already burned all the
chairs, and that the tables in the jury-room
would very soon follow if they were not
liberated. Another jury similarly enclosed in very
hot weather, sent to request a little water, when
a modern judge considerately and facetiously
determined that water was not drink!

Sir Thomas Smith, who wrote in the reign of
Elizabeth, in his Commonwealth of England
quaintly informs us that "the party with whom
they have given their sentence giveth the
inquest their dinner that day most commonly, and
this is all they have for their labour." This
practice was probably succeeded by paying the
jury, and in the days of corruption, when jury-
packing was the fashion in trials for what were
deemed political libels and other crown
prosecutions, it became a rather lucrative employment
to serve regularly on special juries. The
members were selected from a favoured and
pliant class, and received a guinea each for every
verdict they returned. So completely were they
considered hirelings, that the body was well
known in the courts as the guinea corps, and
those composing it individually as being engaged
in the guinea trade.

The barbarous severity of our criminal code
often perplexed the humanity of juries in
former days, when the death of the culprit
was considered the only expiation of what
would be now deemed a trifling offence. Down
to the reign of Queen Anne a person
convicted of stealing to the value of twelve pence
was liable to be hanged; but such was the
favour shown to the clerical orders, and their
supposed acquisition of learning, that before the
unhappy culprit was sentenced lhe was permitted
to plead the benefit of clergy. A cleric,
appointed by the bishop of the diocese, attended
every assizes, and upon his announcement.
"Legit," or "Non Legit," depended the fate of
the convicted culprit. A book containing what
was termed the "neck verse" was handed to the
prisoner, and he was required to read it; if he
could, he was declared entitled to the benefit,
and his life spared; if he could not, he was
executed. The wisdom and justice, as well as the
gallantry of our ancestors, were singularly
displayed in their criminal regulations respecting
the fair sex. Probably a female could not lawfully
be a cleric—women, therefore, were not entitled
to claim the benefit of clergy, and accordingly
when convicted of larceny, were invariably
hanged, whether they could read or not. When
the standard of capital criminality was
subsequently raised to forty shillings, the severity of
the law still imposed on juries the necessity of
reducing the value of the property stolen, and
their consciences permitted of such latitude,
that in the case of a woman indicted for stealing
a ten-pound Bank of England note, the twelve
men on their oaths found that the value of it
was only thirty-nine shillings. This trifling with
a solemn obligation may, perhaps, be pardoned as
a pious and merciful fraud, but the labours of
the late Sir Samuel Romilly and the legislation
of the late Sir Robert Peel at length rescued
our criminal jurisprudence from the scandal,
sin, and shame of such examples.

A fearful responsibility at times attached to
juries in convicting and consigning to premature
graves persons who proved afterwards to be
innocent. The case in the state trials of Joan
Perry and her two sons, executed at Gloucester,
for the murder of William Harrison, who
subsequently returned from the Continent, is familiar
to most readers; but there were many such, and
the following very remarkable one, in which the
circumstances would seem to have justified the
jury, is but little known. A man of considerable
property, in or near London, died, leaving an
only child, a daughter, aged about eighteen, and
by his will appointed his brother her guardian
and sole executor. The will directed that if the
daughter should die without having married, or
if married without children, her fortune should
go to the uncle, whose interest was therefore
supposed to be incompatible with that of the
niece. Several of the relatives, discontented
with the father's ultimate disposition, threw out
dark hints that they ought not to live together;
notwithstanding which, the uncle removed the
niece to his own residence, near Epping Forest.