decided before. And in these collateral issues the trial shall be instanter, and no time allowed the prisoner to make his defence or produce his witnesses, unless he will make oath that he is not the person attainted: (Fors. C. L. 41) neither shall any peremptory challenges of the jury be allowed the prisoner; though formerly such challenges were held to be allowable, whenever a man's life was in question." 4 Bl. Com. 396. And query whether this is not the better doctrine; the case of Mr. Radcliffe, brother of Lord Derwentwater, (Fors. C. L. 41) in which the contrary was held, was for high treason shortly after the rebellion of 1745; and as Sir M. Forster says,
- [Footnote: back, one of whom stationed himself at the head of the horses, while
the other went to the side of the chaise. The night was dark, but from the flash of the pistols he could distinctly see that it was a dark-brown horse, between 13 and 14 hands high, of a very remarkable shape, having a square head, and very thick shoulders; and, altogether such that he could pick him out of fifty horses; he had seen the horse since at Mr. Kendall's stables, in Long Acre. He also perceived, by the same flash of light, that the person at the side-glass had on a rough-shag, brown great coat.
Writers on forensic medicine have enumerated the various circumstances, by which the countenance of an individual may be so changed, as to defeat every attempt to identify him. Foderé mentions the following, age; loss, or acquisition of fat; change in the colour of the eyes or hair; the effects of climate, diet, diseases, and passions of the mind. These may also be metamorphosed by art. The influence of mental anxiety in changing the countenance is universally acknowledged—
Danger, long travel, want, or woe,
Soon change the form that best we know;
For deadly fear can time outgo,
And blaunch at once the hair;
Hard toil can roughen form and face,
And want can quench the eye's bright grace,
Nor does old age a wrinkle trace
More deeply than despair.
Marmion, Canto I.
]
