The unfortunate butler, George Broomfield, whose brain had never recovered
from an accident in which a heavy discharge of small shot entered it, and who, amidst various other delusions originating in that accident, thought himself so much in love with a former fellow-servant that he was obliged either to shoot her and himself, or persuade her to run away with him, was tried and found guilty last Monday of murdering Mrs. Colborne, the young woman referred to, at Shirley, near Southampton, on the 3rd December last. The evidence showed him to be entirely out of his right mind ; for some time before the murder he said his blood turned to water ; he felt a trickling from his heart ; he was frequently found crying ; he said his stomach was falling to pieces, and his head .empty; and he was under a chronic delusion that his wife was dying, and that it had broken his heart,—his wife being perfectly well. To our minds insanity could never be pleaded as barring the hypothesis of murder in the legal sense, if it might not be in this case. Juries, however, go by some secret law of probability of their own, and generally solve the questions presented to them in the opposite way to other reasoning creatures. This jury did not even recommend Broomfield to mercy.
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