passage. This once fixed upon the threshold of darkness, the gloom and terror of the pilgrimage are over and past. A serener landscape dawns before us: "Locos lætos et amœna vireta Fortunatorum nemorum, sedesque be atas." These, then, are some of our chimes for the new year. Other bells may ring a livelier peal, but, we think, not a truer one. In all chiming there is sadness, but sadness that only sweetens the joy. The wind and the rain endear the fireside, and May herself looks lovelier for the winter cloak she throws off. "Still I live here," wrote Johnson, "by my own self, and have had of late very bad nights; but then, I have had a pig to dinner, which Mr. Perkins gave Thus life is chequered." Let it be so with ours. me. We have led our readers into the steeple of time, that they may behold the country behind and before them. The road has taken a new turn, but it will lead through scenery very similar to the former. It may be a wise rule to keep as much as possible in the middle of it, for it will not be forgotten that two roads run nearly parallel, and seem occasionally to intersect each other. Experience, however, has set up sufficient hand-posts to guide the traveller. But a cautious eye is neces sary. "The swerving of a step may be so slight as to be scarcely observed, yet a wide angle may at length result from successive inconsiderable flexions." For some of us there may be more than one sepulchre in the Arcadia that is opening upon the eye. Perhaps, even the beaten path may be obliterated by some descending water-flood of difficulty or trial. And if the land become a stormy sea, it matters nothing. "Oh, blindness to the future! kindly given, That each may fill the circle mark'd by Heaven." Whatever may be the cold and hunger of the disconsolate heart, it shall be satisfied and warmed. We read of those who had toiled all night, that " as soon as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread." It was a lonely shore; yet an unexpected fire cheered, and a strange Visitor illuminated it. If there be any truth in the chimes of ages, it shall be so with us. The night of the present may be toilsome, and dark, and unprofitable; but a clear fire burns, and a rich repast is spread upon the tranquil shore of the future. Happy for us if we leave behind us this brief epitaph, "Proved by the ends of being, to have been." THE PHILOSOPHY OF CRIME, WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM No. I. WILLIAM HORNE. We are inclined to believe that attention has never yet been turned, as it might be, to one of the most important questions which can exercise the mind of a thinking man. Crime prevails on all sides of us: and the circumstances attending its commission and its consequences, as they affect both the guilty and the innocent, are set forth in every newspaper that comes into our hands; but trace back each offence to its remote causes, to follow the trail from step to step, till we reach the first faint outlines of the path, by pursuing which the individual has won for himself a frightful notoriety, no one worthy to be accounted a philosopher has ever, as far as we are aware, attempted. The Christian moralist, it is true, finds a direct and easy solution to all difficulties. He quotes the words of Holy Writ; and, assuring us that "the heart of man is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked," he flatters himself that in the besetting corruption of human nature the source of all the outrages upon right and decency that shock our moral sense is to be found. We have no desire to enter into controversy with him. Believing, as firmly as he does, that the Bible is the word of God, we believe also that there is no living man who can assert with truth that he is free from many movements to evil. But crime and moral evil are very different things; and though the one may be shewn to be in many instances the excess of the other, it is a lame order of reasoning which would, therefore, lead to the conclusion that both are, through the operation of the same causes, to be accounted for. escape from the commission of some hideous crime. And here again, though ourselves no believers in phrenology, we should be slow to pronounce that Dr. Combe is absolutely in error. The heads of some of the most remarkable criminals which the last half century has produced have undergone, if we are not mistaken, phrenological examination; and the results were, in every instance, such as to confirm, to a certain extent, Dr. Combe's theory. But Dr. Combe's theory no more touches the root of the difficulty, than it is laid bare by the more comprehensive assumption of the Christian reasoner. It may be that men's passions, when indulged to excess, work upon the surface of their skulls as the habitual exercise of the arm or the leg enlarges the muscles of the limb. But the question still remains, “What in the beginning led to such excessive indulgence?" and how came the man, seeking his own gratification throughout, to brace himself up to the perpetration of some deed, the discovery of which must, as he feels all along, lead to his irretrievable ruin? We confess that, be the doctrine of the phrenologist in other respects as rational as it may, in this it fails to supply the information that we seek. It deals with effects, whereas we desire to become acquainted with causes; for it is only by laying these bare to the perception and the right understanding of mankind, that we can hope to put society upon the way of training its members so that crime, if it do not absolutely cease, shall at least become less frequent than it has heretofore Again, there are persons in the been in the world. Of course our world, acute and clever men in their reasoning is not to be understood as way, who tell us that vice and applicable to men in a mere state of virtue are mere accidents, because, nature. The savage has no right in point of fact, they are the results perception of the difference between of physical organisation. Dr. Combe good and evil. An arbitrary code of will manipulate a head, and prohis own he every where possesses, of nounce, when he is done with it, that which the particular enactments not the wearer cannot, unless restrained unfrequently contradict the preby an influence that is irresistible, judices of his more civilised brother. But of him we do not desire to take any account. If we deal with him at all, it ought to be entertaining a constant desire to reclaim him; to teach him our arts, to communicate to him our feelings, and to lead him forward to perceive and rightly to appreciate what is in itself good. Till we shall have done this, he is no fit subject for our study; and as neither the means nor the opportunity of accomplishing so great an end happen at this moment to be accessible to us, we will, with our reader's leave, pass him by, and look exclusively to the condition of persons who, being born in a Christian land, have, at least in theory, the wisest of all moral rules to guide them we mean the volume of the New Testament. And here it may be necessary to explain at the outset what we mean by the term crime, as contradistinguished from moral evil; for it is a great mistake to suppose that the one is necessary to, and in all cases the consummation and perfection of the other. Crime, according to our present theory, is an offence, not so much against the eternal law of right, as against society; the maintenance of which, to any useful purpose, depends upon the exemption which is secured to each of its members separately against a certain class of outrages. To take away the life of our fellow man, for example, except in defence of our own, is crime. To appropriate to our own use goods or money that belong to another, is crime also. Perjury in a court of law is likewise crime; for it impedes, and may render impracticable, the due administration of justice. Forgery, swindling, and the whole category of frauds come under the same head; they are attacks upon property. In like manner we must include adultery in our list of crimes, at least in cases where a married woman is concerned; because its consequences may be, and often are, that a spurious offspring is imposed upon a family, to the manifest violation of the rights of those who are by such means deprived of the whole or a portion of the fortune which would have otherwise come to them. the other hand, we do not account either the promiscuous intercourse of the sexes, or habits of untruth, or drunkenness, or dissolute talk, as On crimes. The moral guilt of all of them is great; indeed it sometimes happens that, when tried by a higher standard than that of society's requirements, the guilt of the mere sinner will prove to be greater than that of a criminal of the first class; but, for obvious reasons, there would be neither wisdom nor justice in awarding to such offences the sort of punishment that waits upon crime. Take a case which has often occurred, and may be expected often to occur again. A man, upright in his transactions with his fellow men, who has heretofore enjoyed an irreproachable reputation, discovers that his wife or daughter has been seduced. He broods over the wrong perhaps many days, and at last falls in with the scoundrel who has blighted his domestic peace, and kills him. He is arrested, thrown into prison, tried, and, it may be, hanged for murder; whereas the miscreant to whom is owing the desolate and degraded condition of a whole family would have escaped scot free, had not the criminal taken the law into his own hands. Which of the two was morally the more guilty? Crime and moral evil may be cognate the one to the other, but there is no necessary connexion between them. The former may originate in the pressure of absolute want, or in the mere lack of self-control under sudden and violent excitement; in either of which cases its reality is compatible with a very slight amount of moral depravity. The latter is invariably the result of an ill-regulated education; which, though it may have stored the memory with knowledge, and stimulated both the imagination and the reasoning faculty, has failed to teach that, in order to form the character, selfcontrol in matters of small as well as of great importance, and the habit of repressing and thwarting our own wishes, even when the object desired may in itself be innocent, are absolutely necessary. The criminal is often as much entitled to our pity as to our censure. The sinner (for we must borrow a word from the theologian, though we desire to be understood as treating our subject more as a matter of moral science than of religion) deserves at all times our unmitigated abhorrence. His one moving principle is selfishness. At house, beset with gable-ends and We are no ascetics; neither do we profess to be of the number of those who charge it as an imperfection against Nature's laws, that she has implanted in the breasts of the opposite sexes a strong desire to come together. The sentiment or passion to which we allude, and which leads to marriage and the propagation of the species, is not only innocent in itself, but praiseworthy. Out of it arise some of the noblest traits that adorn the human character;-disinterestedness, self-denial, the devotion of one will to another; and it is the undoubted source of all those pure and holy affections on the comparative strength or weakness of which civilisation may, in a great measure, be said to depend. But it must, to produce these happy results, be guided and controlled by an influence more potent than itself; for if it once establish an ascendancy over the mind-particularly in youth, which is most open to its insidious advances-the whole moral being of the man becomes vitiated. No matter with what quickness of parts the sensualist is gifted. He may or may not exercise his intellectual faculties as he grows up, but it will never be in the prosecution of a noble or righteous purpose; and should he chance to be of a dull capacity, then is it difficult to put a limit to the degree of degradation to which he may ultimately fall; for there is positively no crime of which the unimaginative slave of lust may not be led into the commission, not hurriedly but deliberately, and, as it would seem, in perfect freedom from the checks of remorse. A remarkable instance of this sort was brought to light in this country something less than a hundred years ago, of which, because it seems fully to illustrate the theory that we are now broaching, we shall proceed to give an account. Butterly Manor-an old-fashioned Butterly Manor, like all other mansions of its class, was long the residence of a family, the head of which holding a place in society distinct from that of the yeoman, scarcely aspired to take his seat on the bench beside the magistrates or squirearchy of the county. Together with the moderate estate that appertained to it, it had been in possession of the Hornes for longer time than can with truth be given to the pedigree of many a family of higher pretensions; and, till the occurrence of events of which it will be our business in the course of the following narrative to speak, there was not one of all its owners but had established for himself a right to the respect of his neighbours by the character for honesty and good conduct, and of liberal hospitality, that appertained to him. But with them we are not now concerned. It was towards the evening of a dull September day, that in a large wainscoted apartment- an upper chamber in the house of which we are now speaking- an old man lay dying. Shrivelled and shrunk he was, for the weight of a hundred years was upon him, and his dull grey eye stood wide open, moving neither to the right nor to the left, but abiding fixed-fixed as the hand of death could render it on the antique canopy which surmounted the antique bed on which he was lying. The hangings of the couch-heavy chintz of a faded yellow, interspersed with faded flowers of red and bluewere in part drawn back; and on a rush-bottomed arm chair, beside which stood a chamber-table surmounted with phials, a cup, a glass, and other sad furniture of a sick chamber, a middle-aged woman sat near him. She seemed to have had her powers of watchfulness a good deal taxed of late; that is to say, her eye-lids went together, as it would appear, involuntarily, and she nodded from time to time as those are apt to do who fight against the advances of sleep and are worsted. Her sleep, however, was neither deep nor refreshing, for the movement of her own head downwards broke it; and the faintest murmur, the slightest stir of the patient, caused her to rouse up and observe him. At last he spoke; and though it was in a tone so feeble as hardly to give to his words an articulate sound, she was up and leaning over him, and eager, as it seemed, to catch and comprehend his meaning in a mo ment. "Martha," whispered the dying 66 hour is at hand. I am man, my going! Raise me a little upon the pillow, and moisten my lips. I must speak to the boys once more. There, that will do. Now a drink-a drink of the cordial, and then go and send them both hither." The woman lifted the feeble old man as a nurse raises an infant, arranged some pillows under his head and shoulders so as to place him in a half-recumbent position, put a little ether to his lips which he swallowed greedily, and quitted the apartment. In a few minutes the tramp of heavy feet sounded on the dark staircase; and the chamber-door being opened, by no means softly, two men, well advanced in years, approached the bed-side. "You are come at last," said the old man, speaking in a more audible tone than he had been able to command while his nurse was near him. "I have looked for you all day, knowing that I should not see another; but you did not so much as look in to satisfy yourselves whether I was alive or dead." "Well," replied the elder of the two, "now that we are here, what do you want?" "Very little with you, Will," was the answer. "You were always very dear to me-very-very-too dear, I am afraid-too dear by far; and I love you still, my son; oh, He knoweth how tenderly! You have not always been a good boy to others; that is, I am afraid not; indeed I am sure you have not; but to me you have never given an hour's pain, except once, you know when! but that is all over now- and and - "Now do hold your bother!" replied the amiable youth of sixty-two, to whom this maudlin rhapsody was addressed; "we've heard all that before; a hundred times, at least. Let's know what you desire besides; and be quick with it, will you, for I don't think you've much time to waste, and I'm sure I have none!" "Very true, Will very true! you were always a sensible boy. Charles, come hither," continued the old man, with difficulty raising his skinny hand from the coverlid on which it lay; " I've a word to say to you!" "Well, father," answered the individual thus addressed," what is it about ?" "About that, you know!" exclaimed the father. "It's always in my mind always. It has never been out of it since first you told it." "The beast!" muttered the elder brother, though scarcely in a tone to be overheard. "You'll keep your promise, won't you? You'll never let it go further? You'll swear this now - now that I am dying, and I'll hear it the last thing before I go?" "I don't like swearing, father," answered Charles. "But you'll promise, Charles ?you'll promise, won't you?" |