Excerpt from The Lives of Twelve Eminent Judges of the Last and of the Present Century, Vol. 2 of 2 The skill and eloquence thus occasionally perverted on the criminal side of the Court never attained greater excellence, or were attended with more complete success, than in wringing damages from the adulterer in an action at Nisi Prius, to an amount rarely heard of before, and which are now again becoming matter of tradition. The law has only recourse to pecuniary compensation in such cases, from the want of power to make the sufferer any other, but this compensation, with Erskine for the plaintiff and Lord Kenyon for the judge, was run up to a dangerous extreme. There might be moral mischief in tempting a husband to expose his wrongs, or a profligate to barter shame for pelf, tainting the public ear with details of domestic infamy, and leading to frequent collusion; but in the discussion of such topics, however much the community might suffer, a forensic orator found large sources of fame and power, and the most ample materials for his art. Erskine boldly justified the prodigality of juries, who showered on his frequently worthless clients sums of 5000l., 8000l., and even 10,000l., urging that the rights they vindicated were more valuable than property, and that no adequate return in money could be made. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

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