not been encouraged. His execution was fixed for the
25th inst.

The six men who made themselves noted by their
Burglary in the House of the Misses Farncombe, near
Uckfield, were tried at Lewes on the 12th; and a
woman, the companion of one of the men, was tried
with them, as a receiver of some of the stolen property.
The most important witness was an accomplice named
Hamilton; who described the arrangement for the
burglary—the assembling of the forces, the putting on
of masks, the taking off of shoes and waistcoats, the
entering on the premises, the violence to the butler, and
terrorism over the ladies. The butler identified two of
the men by their voices; and the stolen property found
on others of them helped to prove their guilt. A
verdict of "Guilty" was returned against all: the men
were sentenced to be transported for life, the woman for
fourteen years.

At the Oxford Assizes on the 8th, Eliza Smully, a
girl of seventeen, was tried for the Murder of Francis
Page, the wife of a farmer with whom the prisoner
resided as a servant. It was proved that the girl had
put arsenic into the coffee which she prepared for her
master and mistress's breakfast. They were both taken
ill after partaking of it; Mr. Page recovered, but his
wife died. The prisoner had stated to the constable,
and afterwards to the coroner, that "she did not think
it would have killed her mistress; she only thought it
would make her badly." She also said that she never
had any complaint against her master or mistress;
and it appeared, in fact, that they had always treated
her with great kindness. When asked the reason
for what she had done, she had said to one witness
that her mistress had come down like a bull-dog that
morning; and to another, that on the Saturday
before, her mistress had charged her with killing a fowl,
and she had told her mistress that she did not.—The
jury found the prisoner guilty of manslaughter only, and
she was sentenced to transportation for fifteen years.

In a case of Bigamy tried at the Northallerton assizes,
Baron Platt gave a judgment which marked his sense of
the inequality of the Divorce Laws for the rich and the
poor. A young man, named Wilby Gaunt, was charged
with having in December last, at Great Driffield, married
Margaret Jennison; his former wife, Margaret Gaunt,
being then alive. The first marriage was solemnised at
the Baptist Chapel, Lincoln, on the 23rd of June, 1845,
and, as the prisoner said, he lived with her for six weeks,
when he absconded, as she proved unfaithful. On the
29th of December last he was married to Margaret
Jennison, of Hutton Cranswick, at the Registrar's office,
Great Driffield, and she said they had lived comfortably
together. The sister of the first wife said she was now
living as "housekeeper" to another man, and had a
child a year and a half old. The judge, in passing
sentence, said the prisoner had married a profligate woman,
who was now living with another man, and was the
mother of a child. Of course he could not live with such
a woman. If he had been a rich man he might have
gone to a court and got a divorce, by which the marriage
would have been dissolved, and he would have been a
free man. But he was a poor man, and could not go to
that expense. That was one of the great defects of our
law. He had been guilty of a breach of the law, for
which he must be punished; and the sentence of the
Court was that he be Imprisoned for seven days. Loud
marks of approbation followed the sentence.

Illicit Distillation on a very extensive scale has been
discovered at a house in a street leading from Hackney
to Bethnal-green. At a late hour on the night of the
7th, two officers forced an entrance into the house, and
captured a man named Wood, in the passage. Wood, who
was in his shirt-sleeves, denied all knowledge of any such
illegal practices, but upon going up-stairs the officers found
the whole of the top part of the house fitted up in the
most complete manner for distillation. In the first
room they found a large still in full operation, with
tubs and coolers filled with molasses wash to the extent
of several hundred gallons, and a large quantity of
spirits of the strongest quality just run off, while in the
room adjoining was a still larger copper still, containing
80 gallons of wash, with furnace alight, and throwing
off spirits to a proportionate extent. Wood was brought
before the Worship-street Police Court, and it being
proved that both stills, from their peculiar construction,
must have burst and destroyed the place if some one
had not been in constant attendance upon them, the
magistrate convicted him in a penalty of £30, and in
default of payment sentenced him to three months'
hard labour in the House of Correction.

At the Lincoln Assizes, on the 10th, George Tuplen
was tried for Night-poaching. The gamekeepers of the
Rev. Charles Constable, who lives near Teally, adopt
an ingenious device for obtaining information whether
poachers are out. They place a six-barrelled gun in a
wood where game is preserved, and attach to it wires,
which are carried in different directions at some distance
from the ground, so that a man passing through the
wood would come in contact with the wires, and notice
of his presence would immediately be given by six
distinct reports. On the night in question, the 12th of
December, between 7 and 8 o'clock, their attention was
aroused by hearing the six reports of the alarm gun,
and upon going out they met with five men, four of whom
at once ran away. The fifth had a gun, and turned once
or twice, using threatening language. The prisoner
was sworn to as being that man, and he was some days
afterwards apprehended in Hull. He was found guilty,
and the judge, in sentencing him to six months'
imprisonment with hard labour, said that he imposed so
light a punishment because there did not appear to have
been any disposition to commit violence on the part of
the prisoner or any of the party with whom he went
out on the night in question.

At the Lewes Assizes on the 12th, an action was tried
at the instance of H. Hart to recover damages from
Messrs. Bradbury and Evans, for a Libel in Punch.
The plaintiff, who is a Jew, had been taken into custody
for inciting a young man named Newland to rob his
employers, and it will be recollected that about the same
period another Jew named Barnett was charged with
a similar offence. Upon the trial of the plaintiff it turned
out that Newland told a great many lies upon the
matter, and as his evidence was not corroborated in
any manner the jury acquitted him. The other man,
Barnett, however, was convicted, and he was sentenced
to be transported for fourteen years. It appeared that
before the trial some comments had been made
upon the conduct of the plaintiff in "Punch," and
it was for those comments that the present action was
brought. There were three counts in the declaration
—the first charging the publication of a specific libel, to
which the defendants pleaded that they had made the
publication without malice, and had subsequently
published an apology, and had paid £5 into court as
damages. The other two counts charged the defendants
with publishing an ironical caricature of the plaintiff,
and that the apology was not bona fide, but that it was
in reality a continuation of the libel. To both these
counts the defendants pleaded "Not Guilty." In
defence against them it was pleaded that the caricature
did not apply to the plaintiff but to the man Barnett, and
that the apology, though humorously written, was
really and truly an apology. The jury gave a verdict
on the first count—£10 in addition to the £5 already
paid into court.

Considerable attention has been excited by a suit in
the Court of Chancery, Metairie v. Wiseman, and
others, the proceedings in which, after occupying the
Vice-Chancellor daily for several weeks, were, on the
14th, terminated without any judgment. The suit
was brought by the next of kin of Mathurin Carré, a
French refugee, who came to this country in the year
1797, and, by the most penurious habits, amassed £10,000
On his deathbed he disposed of £7000 of his money, by a
deed of gift, for the purpose of founding a girls' school
in connexion with the Roman Catholic chapel of St.
Aloysius in Somer's Town. Cardinal Wiseman is a
nominal defendant in consequence of his ecclesiastical
status. The allegations of the plaintiffs are that their
relative, a weak old man in the last stage of a mortal
disease, had fallen under the influence of Holdstock the
priest of the above chapel, who, hearing of his condition
and the amount of his property, had forced himself upon
him, and induced, or rather compelled him, by the
exercise of religious terrorism, to make the deed of gift