The action for libel brought by Mr. O'Brien against the
-Cork Constitution, which lasted three days, and was tried before a special jury at the Cork Assizes, ended on Monday in a verdict of £100 damages for the plaintiff. The cross- examination of Mr. O'Brien was the chief feature of the trial. Some of the most infamous of the attacks made by United Ireland upon Lord Spencer were put to him, and he was asked for an explanation, which was that " now they knew Earl Spencer's real character, they regretted they had said a great many things that they now knew to be scandalously false as of himself," though, Mr. O'Brien went on to say, " most unquestionably " true of the system. In fact, then, Mr. O'Brien is willing to admit that when he—or his paper— said that " Messrs. Spencer and Trevelyan can never scrape themselves clean of the ordure with which this case has for ever daubed their reputations ;" when he declared that Lord Spencer " stopped at nothing ; not at secret torture, not
at subsidising red-handed murderers not at whole- sale battues of hangings and transportations by hook or crook ;" or when he spoke of Lord Spencer's viceregal ermine " besplashed by the ostentatious shelter held out to loyal bestiality,"—he was saying things that were scandalously false. We presume, too, that the infamous description of Sir George Trevelyan as "the smaller, meaner beast of prey, the jackal Trevelyan, with all the jackal's cowardice, the jackal's cruelty, and the jackal's love of caution," is to be dismissed in the same way as scandalously false. After this, Mr. Balfour may well say of the foul abuse heaped on him each week in United Ireland, what Dryden said of Settle,-
" If he call rogue and rascal from a garret, He means you no more mischief than a parrot."
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