XXVII
THE PERORATION
"It is too much the custom, my friends," Northcote
continued to the jury when Mr. Weekes had
sat down as spasmodically as he had got up, "to
regard this divine mystic of whom I have spoken
as a supernatural being whose name can only be
mentioned with propriety in the presence of an
elaborate ritual. That fetish dies hard, my friends,
but dying it is, for if ever a human being walked
this earth, whose life and opinions are a great poem
that deserves to be recited in our bosoms and our
businesses during every hour that we dwell, it is
the life and opinions of him who has already given
his verdict in this case. There are very few things
that are of any importance to us upon which we
have not his pronouncement in one form or another;
and though that pronouncement may not
always be coincident with the technical lawyer's
law of the time, which is understanded of no man,
least of all of themselves, these obiter dicta of his,
delivered upon the spur of the occasion, have already
outlasted kings, dynasties, and nations; and
they are likely to endure when court-houses, jury-boxes,
and scaffolds have long ceased to be.
"A few centuries ago such words as I am now addressing to you would have sent me to the lions, and you also would have been torn in pieces for having deigned to listen to them. It is not a hun-
