his head buried in his hands, and gave no sign! It is time, however, to descend once more to the terra firma of fact. The Lord Advocate conducted the case for the Crown with almost judicial moderation. He proved the motive for the alleged crime; he showed that L'Angelier's death was undoubtedly caused by arsenic; he ridiculed the hypoth eses of accident and suicide; and finally, he showed that the prisoner had actually had in her possession large quantities of the very poison by whose agency L'Angelier's life had been taken away. Only one link seemed wanting. Sir James Moncrieff was unable to prove that on the night before his death L'Angelier had seen Miss Smith at alt. Inglis followed with perhaps the finest speech ever delivered in a British court of law. " The charge against the prisoner," he began, "is murder; and the penalty of murder is death." Having thus over whelmed the minds of the jury with the gravity of the issue they had to try, he adroitly threw the responsibility for the famous letters upon L'Angelier; dwelt on the utter and all but admitted failure of the

Crown to prove the attempt at murder (for which the prisoner was also indicted); en larged upon the absence of any proof that on the fatal night the prisoner and L'Angelier had met; and concluded with a passionate warning to the jury not to lift the veil that . Providence had drawn over the mystery, but to leave it, if need be, to that great day of assize on which the secrets of all hearts should be revealed. The result is matter of history, and has already been noticed in this paper. Inglis was even more illustrious on the bench than at the bar. He became the Cairns or the Selborne of Scotch judicial history; and his judgments are justly famed for combined strength and elegance of dic tion, and for profound and accurate knowl edge of law. He was regarded with extra ordinary veneration by his professional brethren, among whom his name will ever be a word with power, though his tall, erect figure, his noble carriage, his courteous manners, his rich voice will give dignity and grace to the Parliament House no longer.

LONDON LEGAL LETTER. London, Feb. 3, 1892. TT is impossible to commence my letter this

• . month without a reference to the lamented

death of H. R. H. the Duke of Clarence and Avondale. On the day when the mournful event occurred, the question was raised whether the courts would continue to sit. No precedent for the course to take on such an occasion had oc curred since the death of the Prince Consort thirty years before, when Sir Alexander Cockburn, the Chief-Justice who was sitting at the Guildhall, determined that it would be best not to interrupt public business; and the same view commended itself the other day to the judges. The Lord Chancellor, who happened to be presiding in Ap peal Court No. 1. said, on taking his seat: "I have received a communication of an event which

will cause grief to the whole nation. After con sideration, however, we think that we shall best be doing our duty by continuing to administer jus tice." In his own court the Lord Chief-Justice, Lord Coleridge, said : " We have received direct information from Marlborough House confirming the sad news of the Duke of Clarence's death. We have considered what is most fitting to be done in these circumstances, and we have come to the conclusion that it will be most seemly to continue the administration of justice in the name of the Queen. Pallida mors ijquo pedes pulsat." Similar statements were made in other courts. On the funeral day, however (Wednesday, January 20), the courts adjourned at two, the entire business of the country almost being suspended during the hours of the mournful ceremony at St. George's