Rare: quickly published reporting of an important current event, the politically motivated free speech trial of one of the so-called Scottish Martyrs, the five men who became Australia's first political prisoners. Campaigning for parliamentary reform, they were tried for sedition in 1793–94 and transported to Sydney in 1794 and 1795. Muir became the most conspicuous of them with his famous daring escape to America in 1796.

Rare: quickly published reporting of an important current event, the politically motivated free speech trial of one of the so-called Scottish Martyrs, the five men who became Australia's first political prisoners. Campaigning for parliamentary reform, they were tried for sedition in 1793–94 and transported to Sydney in 1794 and 1795. Muir became the most conspicuous of them with his famous daring escape to America in 1796.

Muir's trial was completed on 31 August and the preface here is dated just nine days later. There seem to have been variant issues according to whether an appendix was included, and if so, whether it ran to 8 or 16 pages. In the present copy the appendix (which appears before the main text) consists of 16 pages, the same as the copy in the Allport Library (though that copy does not include the naive frontispiece portrait by John Kay of Muir holding papers and declaiming, present here). The bibliographer Ferguson, who describes his own copy and that in the National Library, does not mention an appendix at all. There are also copies in the Dixson and Mitchell collections in the State Library of NSW.

The book was published in sympathy with the dissident cause, the verso of the half-title reading:'The following account of Mr Muir's Trial is not offered to the Public from the view of obtaining any pecuniary advantage to the Publisher. The profits were left to be disposed of in any charitable manner which Mr Muir might direct; and he has desired them to be given for the relief of poor prisoners'.