THE MAN WHO SHOT AT QUEEN VICTORIA.

Hawke's Bay Herald, Volume 12, Issue 925, 14 March 1868, Page 4

THE MAN WHO SHOT AT QUEEN VICTORIA.

The British Medical Joimml says: — " After twenty-seven years of confinement in a criminal lunatic asylum, during which his conduct has been exemplary, and no traces have appeared of mental aberration, Oxford, the potboy, who shot at her Majesty in St. James's Park, has been liberated. Dui'ing this time many appeals have been made in his behalf by influential persons who have had the opportunity of watching his demeanor and guaging his character. His own story has always been, and was so consistently from the first, that the pistol which he fired was not loaded. It will be remembered that no bullet was ever found. He attributes the criminal act which he has expiated by long immurement, and which, under a less merciful government, must have cost him his life, to inordinate vanity, fostered by a variety of trivial circumstances in his domestic life and training on which we need not dwell, and which led to a senseless desire to attain notoriety by some means ; and this foolish and criminal impulse led to his lamentable crime. He has occupied his time in a certain amount of self-education, of which the means have been granted to him at Broadmoor and in the asylum in which he was formerly confined, and has become a tolerable linguist. He has also taught himself, and practised graining, which he does sufficiently well to earn a living. He has been mercifully released, but has been veiy properly prohibited from remaining in .or visiting England. Whether directly insane at the time of his crime, or led by a wretched love of notoriety, it is very right that the person of the Sovereign should be protected from the vanity of a man who, at however distant a period, could commit the cowardly outrage of which he was the perpetrator."