three sons--John, Ron

Of Elizabeth

Canning--he resolved

to bring this popular idol to justice. On the 29th of April
1754, she was brought to trial for wilful and corrupt perjury. Her

trial lasted to the 13th of May. It is one of the longest in the collection called the
_State Trials_, and is a more full and elaborate inquiry than

the trial of Charles I. The case made out was complete and crushing,
and the perfect clearness with which the whole truth connected with the movements
from day to day, and from hour to hour, of people in the humblest rank was laid open, shews the great

capabilities of our public jury-system for getting at the truth. One part of the case was, the absurdity of Elizabeth Canning's
story, and its inconsistency, in minute particulars, with itself and with the concomitant facts. When her first description of the room,
in which, she said, she was shut
up, was compared with the full survey of it afterwards undertaken, important and fatal discrepancies
were proved. She professed to have been unable to see anything
going on in the
house from her place of confinement, but in the
room at Enfield Wash there was a large hole through the floor for a jack-rope, which gave a full view of the kitchen, where the
inmates of the house chiefly resorted. She professed to describe every article in the room she was confined in, but she had said nothing of a very
remarkable chest of drawers found in that which she id entified as the same. That this piece of furniture had not been recently placed there was made evident, by the damp dust gluing it to the wall, and the host of spiders
which ran from their webs when it was removed. She had escaped
by stepping on a penthouse, but there was none against the garret of Mrs Wells's house; the windows were high, and s