plete revolution which was effected in this sphere by the influence of Christianity. A few words may be added on the later phases of this mournful history. The Reformation does not seem to have had any immediate effect in multiplying suicide, for Protestants and Catholics held with equal intensity the religious sentiments which are most fitted to prevent it, and in none of the persecutions was impatience of life largely displayed. The history at this period passes chiefly into the new world, where the unhappy Indians, reduced to slavery, and treated with atrocious cruelty by their conquerors, killed themselves in great numbers; till the Spaniards, it is said, discovered an ingenious method of deterring them, by declaring that the master also would commit suicide, and would pursue his victims into the world of spirits. In Europe the act was very common among the witches, who underwent all the sufferings with none of the consolations of martyrdom. Without enthusiasm, without hope, without even the consciousness of innocence, decrepit in body, and distracted in mind, compelled in this world to endure tortures, before which the most impassioned heroism might quail, and doomed, as they often believed, to eternal damnation in the next, they not unfrequently killed themselves in the agony of their despair. A French judge named Remy tells us that he knew no less than fifteen witches commit suicide in a single year.2 'In our age, when the Spaniards extended that law which was made only against the cannibals, that they who would not accept the Christian religion should incur bondage, the Indians in infinite numbers escaped this by killing themselves, and never ceased till the Spaniards, by some counterfeitings, made them think that they also would kill themselves, and follow them with the same severity into the next life.'Donne's Biathanatos, p. 56 (ed. 1644). On the evidence of the early travellers on this point, see the essay on England's Forgotten Worthies,' in Mr. Froude's Short Studies. 2 Lisle, pp. 427-434. Sprenger has noticed the same tendency among the witches he tried. See Calmeil, De la Folie (Paris, 1845), tome i. pp. 161, 303-305. In these cases, fear and madness combined in urging the victims to the deed. Epidemics of purely insane suicide have also not unfrequently occurred. Both the women of Marseilles and the women of Lyons were afflicted with an epidemic not unlike that which, in antiquity, had been noticed among the girls of Miletus. In that strange mania which raged in the Neapolitan districts from the end of the fifteenth to the end of the seventeenth century, and which was attributed to the bite of the tarantula, the patients thronged in multitudes towards the sea, and often, as the blue waters opened to their view, they chanted a wild hymn of welcome, and rushed with passion into the waves.2 But together with these cases, which belong rather to the history of medicine than to that of morals, we find many facts exhibiting a startling increase of deliberate suicide, and a no less startling modification of the sentiments with which it was regarded. The revival of classical learning, and the growing custom of regarding Greek and Roman heroes as ideals, necessarily brought the subject into prominence. The Catholic casuists, and at a later period philosophers of the school of Grotius and Puffendorf, began to distinguish certain cases of legitimate suicide, such as that committed to avoid dishonour or probable sin, or that of the soldier who fires a mine, knowing he must inevitably perish by the explosion, or that of a condemned person who saves himself from torture by anticipating an inevitable fate, or that of a man who offers himself to death for his friend.3 The effect of the 1 On modern suicides the reader may consult Winslow's Anatomy of Suicide; as well as the work of M. Lisle, and also Esquirol, Maladies mentales (Paris, 1838), tome i. pp. 526-676. 2 Hecker's Epidemics of the Middle Ages (London, 1844), p. 121. Hecker in his very curious essay on this mania, has preserved a verse of their song: 'Allu mari mi portati 3 Cromaziano, Ist. del Suicidio, caps. viii. ix. Pagan examples may frequently be detected in the last words or writings of the suicides. Philip Strozzi, when accused of the assassination of Alexander I. of Tuscany, killed himself through fear that torture might extort from him revelations injurious to his friends, and he left behind him a paper in which, among other things, he commended his soul to God, with the prayer that, if no higher boon could be granted, he might at least be permitted to have his place with Cato of Utica and the other great suicides of antiquity.1 In England, the act appears in the seventeenth century and in the first half of the eighteenth to have been more common than upon the Continent,2 and several partial or even unqualified apologies for it were written. Sir Thomas More, in his 'Utopia,' represented the priests and magistrates of his ideal republic permitting or even enjoining those who were afflicted with incurable disease to kill themselves, but depriving of burial those who had done so without authorisation.3 Dr. Donne, the learned and pious Dean of St. Paul's, had in his youth written an extremely curious, subtle, and learned, but at the same time feeble and involved, work in defence of suicide, which on his deathbed he commanded his son neither to publish nor destroy, and which his son published in 1644. Two or three English suicides left behind them elaborate defences, as did also a Swede named Robeck, who drowned himself in 1735, and whose treatise, published in the following year, acquired considerable celebrity. But ter fogs. The statistics made in the present century prove beyond question that they are most numerous in summer. 1 Cromaziano, pp. 92-93. 2 Montesquieu, and many Continental writers, have noticed this, and most English writers of the eighteenth century seem to admit the charge. There do not appear, however, to have been any accurate statistics, and the general statements are very untrustworthy. Suicides were supposed to be especially numerous under the depressing influence of English win 4 3 Utopia, book ii. ch. vi. 4 A sketch of his life, which was rather curious, is given by Cromaziano, pp. 148–151. There is a long note on the early literature in defence of suicide, in Dumas, Traité du Suicide (Amsterdam, 1723), pp. 148-149. Dumas was the most influential writings about suicide were those of the French philosophers and revolutionists. Montaigne, without discussing its abstract lawfulness, recounts, with much admiration, many of the instances in antiquity. Montesquieu, in a youthful work, defended it with ardent enthusiasm.2 Rousseau devoted to the subject two letters of a burning and passionate eloquence,3 in the first of which he presented with matchless power the arguments in its favour, while in the second he denounced those arguments as sophistical, dilated upon the impiety of abandoning the post of duty, and upon the cowardice of despair, and with a deep knowledge of the human heart revealed the selfishness that lies at the root of most suicide, exhorting all who felt impelled to it to set about some work for the good of others, in which they would assuredly find relief. Voltaire, in the best-known couplet he ever wrote, defends the act on occasions of extreme necessity.4 Among the atheistical party it was warmly eulogised, and Holbach and Deslandes were prominent as its defenders. The rapid decomposition of religious opinions. weakened the popular sense of its enormity, and at the same time the humanity of the age, and also a clearer sense of the a Protestant minister who wrote against suicide. Among the English apologists for suicide (which he himself committed) was Blount, the translator of the Life of Apollonius of Tyana, and Creech, an editor of Lucretius. Concerning the former there is a note in Bayle's Dict. art. Apollonius.' The latter is noticed by Voltaire in his Lettres Philos. He wrote as a memorandum on the margin of his 'Lucretius,' 'N.B. When I have finished my Commentary I must kill myself;' which he accordingly did-Voltaire says to imitate his favourite author. (Voltaire, Dict. phil. art. 'Caton.') 1 Essais, liv. ii. ch. xiii. Nouvelle Héloïse, partie iii. let. 21-22. Esquirol gives a curious illustration of the way the influence of Rousseau penetrated through all classes. A little child of thirteen committed suicide, leaving a writing beginning: 'Je lègue mon âme à Rousseau, mon corps à la terre.'-Maladies mentales, tome i. p. 588. 4 In general, however, Voltaire was extremely opposed to the philosophy of despair, but he certainly approved of some forms of suicide. See the articles Caton' and 'Suicide,' in his Dict. philos. true limits of legislation, produced a reaction against the horrible laws on the subject. Grotius had defended them. Montesquieu at first denounced them with unqualified energy, but in his later years in some degree modified his opinions. Beccaria, who was, more than any other writer, the representative of the opinions of the French school on such matters, condemned them partly as unjust to the innocent survivors, partly as incapable of deterring any man who was resolved upon the act. Even in 1749, in the full blaze of the philosophic movement, we find a suicide named Portier dragged through the streets of Paris with his face to the ground, hung from a gallows by his feet, and then thrown into the sewers; and the laws were not abrogated till the Revolution, which, having founded so many other forms of freedom, accorded the liberty of death. Amid the dramatic vicissitudes, and the fierce enthusiasm of that period of convulsions, suicides immediately multiplied. 'The world,' it was said, had been 'empty since the Romans.' For a brief period, and in this one country, the action of Christianity appeared suspended. Men seemed to be transported again into the age of Paganism, and the suicides, though more theatrical, were perpetrated with no less deliberation, and eulogised with no less enthusiasm, than among the Stoics. But the tide of revolution passed away, and with some qualifications the old opinions resumed their authority. The laws against suicide were, indeed, for the most part abolished. In France and several other lands there exists no legislation on the subject. In other countries the law simply enjoins burial without religious ceremonies. In England, the burial in a highway and the mutilation by a stake were abolished under George IV.; but the monstrous injustice of confiscating to the Crown the entire property of the deliberate suicide still 1 2 1 Lisle, Du Suicide, pp. 411, Romains.'-St.-Just, 412. 2 Le monde est vide depuis les Danton. Procés de |