and carried conviction with it. Rose greatly exerted himself for the defence. In his cross-examination of the accuser, he 'most happily exposed,' says Hayley, 'the falsehood and malignity of the charge, and also spoke very eloquently for his client,' though, in the midst of his speech, seized with illness, and concluding it with difficulty. Blake's neighbours joined Hayley in giving him the same character of habitual gentleness and peaceableness; which must have a little astonished the soldier, after his peculiar experiences of those qualities. A good deal of the two soldiers' evidence being plainly false, the whole was received with suspicion. It became clear that whatever the words uttered, they were extorted, in the irritation of the moment, by the soldier's offensive conduct.
'After a very long and patient hearing,' the Sussex Advertiser continues, 'he was, by the jury, acquitted; which so gratified the auditory that the court was, in defiance of all decency, thrown into an uproar by their noisy exultations. The business of the afore-going Sessions,' it is added, 'owing to the great length of time taken up by the above trials' (Blake's and others), 'was extended to a late hour on the second day, a circumstance that but rarely happens in the western division' of the county. 'The Duke of Richmond sat, the first day, from ten in the morning till eight at night, without quitting the court, or taking any refreshment.'
An old man at Chichester, but lately dead, who was present as a stripling, at the trial, attracted thither by his desire to see Hayley, 'the great man' of the neighbourhood, said, when questioned, that the only thing he remembered of it was Blake's flashing eye
Great was Hayley's satisfaction. 'It was late in the evening,' writes he to Johnson, and 'I was eager to present the delivered artist to our very kind and anxious friend, the lady of Lavant, Mrs. Poole.' The friendly welcome and social evening meal which followed all this frivolous vexation and even peril, the pleasant meeting in the cheerful hospitable house of the
