square form, all the party being immersed nearly up to their throats in water so hot that the steam rose from it in clouds, while they seemed to be patiently undergoing the process of parboiling! The ladies and gentlemen, mixed indiscriminately together, were surrounded by children, romping and splashing through the water near their parents. Each patient, of course, wore a long robe or bathing-gown, and most of them some kind of head-dress. Before them floated small tables, on which the ladies placed their work, the gentlemen their books and newspapers, and the children their toys. Some of the company sipped their chocolate; others passed their time in clipping different coloured papers, and pasting them into artificial flowers; and certainly the greater number, though merely chatting together, appeared to be enjoying themselves greatly. In short, it was like an ordinary assembly, seated in different parts of a large drawing-room, with only the queer addition of hot water as a medium of communication ! In a low gallery, extending along the four sides of the bath, sat groups of other persons, friends of the invalids, who without entering the water, lent their society to keep up the spirits of the patients whom the protracted discipline of this strange method of cure requires to remain soaking from eight to ten hours a-day!'— vol. i. pp. 148, 149.

The author advises his readers to try this bathnay, he says, there seemed to be such a merry sort of innocent indecorum about the whole of this transaction,' that he himself felt strongly tempted to join the party in the hot water. Again we regret that the Captain's practice should not have corresponded with his preaching.

In the second volume there are some very good sketches of Paris and its society-and in the midst of these gaieties comes the darkest chapter in the book, and, notwithstanding its faults, the best. The very title, The Gallows and the Guillotine,' seems to blot the page.

6

The frequent agitation of the great and awful question, regarding the abolition of the punishment of death, argues well for the humanity of the age in which we live. Much had been done, before the last session of Parliament, to mitigate the severity of our criminal code, and, as we think, wisely and well; but it now seems as if we might live to see the extreme penalty wiped from the statute-book altogether. For the last outrage of ferocious man upon feeble woman, and for all cruel violences where the sufferers are left in such a state,

That death and nature do contend about them,

Whether they live or die,'

1

we had hoped never to see it abolished; and we humbly think that the House of Lords has now gone too far - but such steps are hard to be retraced.

"

It being still allowed, however, that the punishment of death is a necessary evil in some cases, few, we think, will be found to renew the proposition lately brought forward by Mr. Rich, for converting the execution of the blood-stained felon into a little private exhibition within the gaol- a tableau mourant to be contemplated only by the duly-appointed authorities and a small circle of individuals. The only legitimate object of punishment is to deter from the commission of crime; and that paramount consideration forms the only ground of justification for taking away life. To say nothing, then, of the odium with which any such select death-commission must be always regarded in this country, and the dangerous practices to which it might lead, what becomes of the example, if the criminal be executed in private? We are aware of all the thousand-times repeated objections about brutalising,' &c.: but the general effect produced is the point; and we are of opinion that the good greatly overbalances the evil.

6

:

We willingly give to those who are constantly mooting these and similar questions, credit for their humanity but it is not to be concealed that the besetting sins of the present day are mob-worship and felon-sympathy. There is nothing greater than the people of this country; there is nothing so base as its mob, except those who pander to it. We respect the sincere politician, however we may condemn his opinions: but the gorge rises equally at a Radical fawning on a lord, or a Tory begriming himself in order to propitiate the many-headed As to the other spot it is impossible not to see that, with a certain class of persons, indifference to the loss of human life is gaining ground, except in the case of ruffians and assassins, for whose fate a maudlin lament is drawled out by morbid sentimentalists aud disappointed men, tified into patriots. No thought is wasted on the victim hurried

monster.

mor

ruthlessly to his account, full of bread; nor on his desolate hearth, nor on his ruined family but the murderer immediately becomes an object of interest, and even tenderness. No wonder that novelists enough should be found to flatter this vileness in the selection of their heroines it is however, too

bad to find real genius stooping to such a traffic.

Captain Hall had, as he tells us, long felt a great desire to 'compare together the methods of execution adopted in England and France. He, accordingly, lays before us both of these dreadful scenes, and so vividly that his reader may spare himself the pain of ever actually beholding either. Powerfully, however, as these pictures are branded upon the imagination, Captain Hall has not, in our opinion, been fair in his choice of examples - nor has he introduced one of them in a manner worthy of his good sense.

His English scene is the execution of Thistlewood and others in 1820 for high treason.

We purposely pass over the execution itself: we have not space to give it entire; and to garble it would be to destroy the effect of the whole. Captain Hall's reflections after the fatal bolt had been withdrawn are these :

The whole sight up to this terrible moment, and for the next hour, was one in the highest degree solemn and impressive; and I could not help believing, as I looked over the silent crowd, and observed their awe-stricken gaze, that, although there must of course have been among so numerous an assemblage some hardened breasts, incapable of being moved even by such a sight, the vast majority could not possibly remain unmoved during the very long hour in which they beheld these five lifeless bodies suspended high in the air over their heads. For my part, at least, I can say with truth that I have never beheld anything nearly so impressive as the whole of this painful tragedy; and judging from what I could detect of the sentiments of the crowd, I should say that they were as deeply moved as it was possible for persons of their class and habits to be moved by anything. I consider, accordingly, that the instruction and warning, the moral lesson, in short, which it is the sole purpose of the laws to inculcate by such dreadful examples, were as fully imparted to the populace as the nature of things will admit of.

I afterwards heard it remarked by an acute observer of men and manners in different countries, that, revolting as capital punishments sometimes are, and of doubtful utility in certain cases, there is no

thing which tends so indisputably as a public execution does to prove to the mass of the people that there is actually a government in the country, willing and strong enough to enforce the laws. Up to the period of the ceremony, therefore, to which we have now brought the description, and which it is of importance to bear in mind terminates all ordinary executions in England, nothing can be conceived more effective, or better calculated, by the awful solemnity of its details, to advance the ends of justice. What follows, in cases of high treason, after the punishment of death, is of far more questionable propriety; not only from its shocking the feelings of the multitude, but what is a still more important consideration, from its tendency to remove, or at all events essentially to weaken, the impression made by what has gone before: the effect being more or less to draw the sym pathies of the spectators from the side of government to that of the sufferers, instead of linking them cordially with the offended laws of their country.

It seems quite obvious that, whenever in a free country the execution of justice is severe, it ought to be divested of everything which looks vindictive-precisely as it is of importance in the preliminary administration of justice to carry on all the proceedings not only with patience and temper, but with a constant leaning towards the accused party; nor is this done from any over-refined tenderness to "poor suffering guilt, but solely for the purpose of carrying the sympathy of the people along with the acts of those to whom they have delegated the duty of administering the government.'vol. ii. pp. 81-83.

The French execution, and its effect on those who witnesed it, form a strong contrast with the English example. As Captain Hall described Thistlewood's exit in London, we could have wished that he had in Paris selected a criminal or criminals of the corresponding class-Fieschi and his associates, for instance. Nothing, however, but the author's own words can convey any idea of the truth with which the spectacle is brought before our eyes; and we must present it, though it absolutely seems to make the page run blood :-

'On a bitter cold day în Paris, in the beginning of December, some years ago, I was present at the execution of a murderer, one Daumas Dupin, by the guillotine, which in those days used to be erected in the well-known Place de Grève, now called the Place de l'Hôtelde-Ville. This situation, which is one of the most centrical in Paris, has recently been changed to one of the places (I forget its name] at a distance from the populous parts of the town, and one better adapted, in many respects, to the purpose.

'My object in going to such an exhibition was two-fold. I had a great curiosity to see the instrument which performed such an important part in the French revolution, at a period when the greater part of the executive functions of the administration resided in the very edge of the knife; to what purpose the world has seen. In the next place, I wished to establish, by actual observation, a fair comparison between the French and English methods of carrying the extreme sentence of the law into effect. I had heard many arguments in favour of the French system, chiefly grounded on two points: first, on the rapidity of its action, and the consequent diminution of suffering to the unhappy object of the punishment; and, secondly, from its being preferable, as a matter of taste, to what is called the dog-like death and protracted exposure of the culprit on the English scaffold.

The prisoner was brought along the quais from the Conciergerie in a common cart, such as the billets of fire-wood used in Paris are carried about in. He was seated on a cross bench with his back turned to the horse, and by the side of a priest, who every now and then held a cross to his companion's lips, but he did not receive this act of attention in a very edifying manner. In spite of the severe cold, the prisoner's head was left uncovered, and his neck also bare, in ominous preparation. The crowd along the different quais had become so dense that the mounted guard who accompanied the cart had enough to do to clear a passage, which was closed again behind, the instant the cart had passed. It seemed a very bad regulation that a prisoner under such circumstances should be paraded for so great a distance through the crowd, and certainly it would facilitate any attempt at rescue, should such a measure be contemplated. The transit of every other kind of conveyance had been intercepted, so that the only sound of wheels came from those of the cart bearing the culprit to the place of execution. Every one I am sure, will remember the descriptions given of this lugubrious sound, which, during the reign of terror, gave dreadful note of preparation at a certain hour every day.'

'On entering the Place de Grève, or rather that part of it which the mounted gendarmes managed with considerable difficulty to keep clear, the surrounding crowd took off their hats, and remained uncovered during the remainder of the ceremony. The effect of this movement was striking enough; but it would have been greater had it been accompanied by any cessation of the universal talking which prevailed from first to last over the whole assembly. More than onehalf of the crowd consisted of women and children. The cart drew up at the foot of a short ladder, reaching from the scaffold to the ground, a height of about six feet. The prisoner and priest then got out, and the poor wretch's hands being tied, and his neck and shoulders still more effectually bared, he was desired to ascend the lad