The trial of Mary Eleanor Wheeler, alias Mrs. Pearcey, for
the murder of Mrs. Hogg and her baby, ended on Wed- nesday in a verdict of " Guilty." The jury were absent only an hour; and the prisoner, when called on to =slier why sentence should not be passed on her, said nothing except that she was innocent. The Judge passed sen- tence of death in the usual form ; but in his address to the prisoner, he employed some unusual expressions : " Yon have become a person of so little moral sense that eventually you have been an instrument, and a willing instrument, in taking away the life of a woman whose only offence towards you was that she was married to a man upon whom you had set your unholy passion." This is universally taken to mean that, in Mr. Justice Denman's opinion, the evidence left room for the suspicion that the prisoner was instigated to her crime. The suspicion is very general ; but as it is unsupported by any trace of evidence, it is more probable that the Judge was using an expression, once common in the pulpit, to describe a man so enslaved by passion as to become its " instrument." The fact that the phrase is now scarcely understood marks a curious change in popular thought.
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