Combine all these circumstances and
elements of the case, and you may faintly enter into the situation of
my poor Agnes. Perhaps the best way to express it at once is by
recurring to the case of a young female Christian martyr, in the early
ages of Christianity, exposed in the bloody amphitheatre of Rome or
Verona, to 'fight with wild beasts,' as it was expressed in mockery--
she to fight the lamb to fight with lions! But in reality the young
martyr _had_ a fight to maintain, and a fight (in contempt of that
cruel mockery) fiercer than the fiercest of her persecutors could have
faced perhaps--the combat with the instincts of her own shrinking,
trembling, fainting nature. Such a fight had my Agnes to maintain; and
at that time there was a large party of gentlemen in whom the
gentlemanly instinct was predominant, and who felt so powerfully the
cruel indignities of her situation, that they made a public appeal in
her behalf. One thing, and a strong one, which they said, was this:--
'We all talk and move in this case as if, because the question appears
doubtful to some people, and the accused party to some people wears a
doubtful character, it would follow that she therefore had in reality a
mixed character composed in joint proportions of the best and the worst
that is imputed to her.
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