well-paid swearers, the captain and the mate of the polacca. First, as to the mate, there is something in the demeanour of a witness more consonant to a candid and true story, than the pertness with which that person answered several questions; and all those who have been accustomed to see witnesses in a court of justice know, that those who are stating falsehoods are extremely apt to give flippant and impertinent answers. The mate of the polacca is precisely a witness of this kind. Upon being asked, "Was the little gun you spoke of, upon the deck?" he answers, "On the deck; we could not carry it in our pocket." I only mention this, because my learned friend the Solicitor-General has said, that he is a witness of great credit. Again, when asked, "How did you travel from Naples to Milan?" he answers, "In a carriage; I could not go on foot." I only state this to remind your lordships of the manner of the witness, which I should not do if he had not been said to be a witness of the most perfectly correct demeanour on the present occasion. But I proceed to the substance of his evidence: I will venture to say, that a better paid witness, a better paid Italian, for any work or labour, has never yet come to your knowledge. He is paid at the rate of £2,000 sterling a-year; he was the mate in that voyage of a trading vessel in the Mediterranean, and he is now the fourth part owner of a vessel upon his own account. So that to give him a sum in proportion to what he makes when at home to make it a compensation instead of a reward, according to the Right Reverend Prelate's learned interpretation-that vessel must earn £8,000 a-year; which is somewhat above an income of from sixteen to eighteen thousand pounds in this country. There is not a ship-owner in all Messina, that makes half the money by all the ships he has of his own proper goods and chattels. In that country, a man of two or three or four hundred pounds a-year is a rich

man.

Fifteen hundred pounds a-year is a property

possessed by none, except the great nobility. Clear profits of £8,000 a-year there! Their names would resound over all Italy as the rich of the earth; and not a man of consequence could have gone from this country to that, who would not have tried to procure letters of recommendation to them. The Cobbler of Messina has lived in history; but in his time he was not so well known as these two paltry shippers would be, if, instead of dealing out the instrument he did, these men kept their palaces and spent their four thousand a-year. And this is his story; and if he does not mean so much as this, so much the better in another way; for then is he wholly perjured.

My lords, the captain of the vessel, as might be expected, is paid at a much higher rate than the mate. He is paid £2,400 a-year; he is fed, lodged, and maintained; every expense is defrayed, and this put into his pocket, and not for the loss of any profits. I have hitherto been considering it as a compensation for the loss of his profits. But his ship is not here; to use the mate's own mode of speech, he did not bring it here in his pocket; though the owner comes to England, the ship is employed in the Mediterranean, and earning her freight; and he is paid this, though he attempts to deny it, he is paid this as a recompense and not as a compensation. The same argument then applies to the captain as to the mate, but in a greater degree, and I shall not go through it. But, it appears there was a cause of quarrel between the captain and the Princess of Wales. He tells you, with some naïveté, that what he had for himself, his mate, and the other twenty men of his crew, and for all his trouble, was a sum considerably less, about a fourth part less, than he receives now for coming over to swear in this business against his ancient freighter. But your lordships recollect what he added to that. He said, "When we take on board royal personages, we trust more to the uncertain than to the certain profits." This is a great truth, well

known to many present, that something certain is often stipulated for, but that something more is often given by way of honorary and voluntary compensation. Then, my lords, I only stop here for one moment, to remind your lordships, that according to this, his expectation is not limited to what he gets, namely, £2,400 a-year, for coming here to swear against the Queen; but he says he has been employed by a royal person; and he tells your lordships that the ascertained compensation bore no proportion to the voluntary reward which he expected from Her Majesty. How much less then has he a right to limit the bounty of her illustrious husband, or of the servants of His Majesty, who have brought him here, if he serves them faithfully, if the case in his hands come safe through, and if no accident happens! If he should succeed in all this, he would then get what would make a mere joke of the £2,400 a-year; though that would be infinitely greater than any shipper ever earned by the employment of his vessel in the Mediterranean Sea.

But independent of the hope of reward, there is another inducement operating on the mind of this witness from another quarter. Is there no spite to gratify? The whole of his testimony, my lords, is bottomed on revenge. I have a right to say this, because he has told me so himself. He has distinctly sworn that he had a quarrel with Bergami, the Queen's chamberlain, whose business it was to pay him the money; and that he complained to his own ambassador, that Bergami had kept back from him £1,300 which he claimed. What happened then? I have made some application, some demand. When I came here last year, I gave a memorial to my ambassador, Count de Ludolph, and I stated, that as I believed myself to have served the British government, because I had had the honour of bearing the English flag, I expected the present which I had not received; and on account of this memorial which I gave to Count de Ludolph, the English

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government have known me to be Vincenzo Gargiuolo of Naples." Now, I mention it as a circumstance which may strike different minds in different ways, but as not immaterial in any view of this case, that the only knowledge the prosecutor of this case has of this witness is, his having made a complaint against the Queen and her chamberlain, for not paying him £1,300 which he said they owed him. He added, that he had been advised to go to London to see after that sum of money. I warrant you, my lords, he does not think he is less likely to see his way clearly towards the success of his claim, in consequence of the evidence which he has given at your lordships' bar.

My lords, there are other matters in the evidence of these two men which deserve the attention of your lordships. I think that a Princess of Wales on board a vessel, sitting upon a gun, with her arms intertwined with those of her menial servant, and sometimes kissing that servant, is a circumstance not of such ordinary occurrence in the Mediterranean, as to make it likely that the captain or mate would forget the most important particulars of it. Yet they do forget, or at least they differ, for I will not allow they forgetthey differ most materially in their history of this strange matter-far more, I will venture to say, than they would differ about the particulars of any ordinary occurrence that really happened. The mate says, that the Queen and Bergami were sitting on a gun, and that they were supporting each other. In the same page, he says afterwards, they were sitting near the mainmast, the Princess sitting on Bergami's lap. Now, the difference between sitting on a gun and near the mainmast may strike your lordships as not important. I state it, because the mate considers it of importance; therefore, I conceive he has some motive for particu larizing it; he means to say, I place my accuracy on these details, which I give at my peril. Accordingly he says, that when he saw the Queen on Bergami's

knees, it was not on a gun, but on a bench near the main-mast; and not one word about kissing do I see in the mate's evidence. He forgets the most important part of the whole; for which reason, your lordships will conclude with me, I think, that he does not confirm the captain. The captain swears differently. He says, "I have seen Bergami sitting on a gun, and the Princess sitting on his knees, and that they were kissing." But do they speak of the same thing? Yes, if they are to be believed at all; for the captain says immediately after, that the mate saw it as well as himself. The mate, however, never says he saw it; and my learned friends did not dare to ask him if he had ever seen it. The captain says, they saw it together; yet when the men are brought to give their evidence,— and they are brought immediately one after the other, -you see the consequence. They totally differ in their account of the story, and differ in a way clearly to show, that the story cannot be true. Now, what think your lordships of this man's desiring you to believe, of his expecting you to believe, that he was a man of such strictness of conduct, and his mate so pure a youth, educated in that primitive, antediluvian Garden of Eden, Naples or Messina, that when he saw a lady go near a man, not touching, observe, but leaning over the place where he was reclined,-nothing indecorous, nothing improper, nothing even light, but only leaning towards the place where he was reposing, -he immediately desired the innocent youth to go away, because, beside being his mate, and therefore, under his especial care in point of morals, by the relation of master and mate, he was moreover his distant relation, and therefore, by the ties of blood also, he had upon his conscience a responsibility for the purity of the sights which should pass before his youthful eyes, and therefore he could not allow him to remain for a moment near that part of the ship, where these two individuals were, because they appeared to be approach