and that of this honourable court. First, my Lord, the whole tenor of my conduct in life contradicts every particular of this indictment. Yet had I never said this, did not my present circumstances extort it from me, and seem to make it necessary. Permit me here, my Lord, to call upon malignity itself, so long and so cruelly busied in this prosecution, to charge upon me any immorality, of which prejudice was not the author. No, my Lord, I concerted no schemes of fraud; projected no violence; injured no man's person or property; my days were honestly laborious; my nights intensely studious. And I humbly conceive my notice of this, especially at this time, will not be thought impertinent or unseasonable, but at least deserving some attention, because, my Lord, that any person, after a temperate use of life, a sense of thinking and acting regularly, and without one single deviation from sobriety, should plunge into the very depth of profligacy, precipitately and at once, is altogether improbable and unprecedented, and absolutely inconsistent with the course of things. Mankind is never corrupted at once, villany is always progressive, and declines from right, step after step, till every regard of probity is lost, and every sense of moral obligation totally perishes.
"Again, my Lord, a suspicion of this kind, which nothing but malevolence could entertain, and ignorance propagate, is violently opposed by my very situation at that time with respect to health: for but a little space before I had been confined to my bed, and suffered under a very long and severe disorder, and was not able for half a year together so much as to walk. The distemper left me indeed, yet slowly and in part, but so macerated, so enfeebled that I was reduced to crutches; and so far from being well about the time I am charged with this fact, that I never to this day perfectly recovered. Could then a person in this condition take any thing into his head so unlikely, so extravagant? I, past the vigour of my age, feeble and valetudinary, with no inducement to engage, no ability to accomplish, no weapon wherewith to perpetrate such a fact, without interest, without power, without motive, without means.
