Chapter II: Part 2

‘Upon my word, Sir,’ said Mr. Blenkinsop, ‘after the observations that I have heard from you this night, I acknowledge that I _do_ feel myself rather at a loss to assign a precise period to the times in question.’

‘Shall I do it for you?’ asked the Statue.

‘If you please, Sir. I should be very much obliged if you would,’ replied the bewildered Blenkinsop, greatly relieved.

‘The best times, Mr. Blenkinsop,’ said the Statue, ‘are the oldest. They are the wisest; for the older the world grows the more experience it acquires. It is older now than ever it was. The oldest and best times the world has yet seen are the present. These, so far as we have yet gone, are the genuine good old times, Sir.’

‘Indeed, Sir?’ ejaculated the astonished Alderman.

‘Yes, my good friend. These are the best times that we know of—bad as the best may be. But in proportion to their defects, they afford room for amendment. Mind that, Sir, in the future exercise of your municipal and political wisdom. Don’t continue to stand in the light which is gradually illuminating human darkness. The Future is the date of that happy period which your imagination has fixed in the Past. It will arrive when all shall do what is right; hence none shall suffer what is wrong. The true good old times are yet to come.’

‘Have you any idea when, Sir?’ Mr. Blenkinsop inquired, modestly.

‘That is a little beyond me,’ the Statue answered. ‘I cannot say how long it will take to convert the Blenkinsops. I devoutly wish you may live to see them. And with that, I wish you good night, Mr. Blenkinsop.’

‘Sir,’ returned Mr. Blenkinsop with a profound bow, ‘I have the honour to wish you the same.’

Mr. Blenkinsop returned home an altered man. This was soon manifest. In a few days he astonished the Corporation by proposing the appointment of an Officer of Health to preside over the sanitary affairs of Beetlebury. It had already transpired that he had consented to the introduction of lucifer-matches into his domestic establishment, in which, previously, he had insisted on sticking to the old tinder-box. Next, to the wonder of all Beetlebury, he was the first to propose a great new school, and to sign a requisition that a county penitentiary might be established for the reformation of juvenile offenders. The last account of him is that he has not only become a subscriber to the mechanics’ institute, but that he actually presided thereat, lately, on the occasion of a lecture on Geology.

The remarkable change which has occurred in Mr. Blenkinsop’s views and principles, he himself refers to his conversation with the Statue, as above related. That narrative, however, his fellow townsmen receive with incredulous expressions, accompanied by gestures and grimaces of like import. They hint, that Mr. Blenkinsop had been thinking for himself a little, and only wanted a plausible excuse for recanting his errors. Most of his fellow aldermen believe him mad; not less on account of his new moral and political sentiments, so very different from their own, than of his Statue story. When it has been suggested to them that he has only had his spectacles cleaned, and has been looking about him, they shake their heads, and say that he had better have left his spectacles alone, and that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and a good deal of dirt quite the contrary. _Their_ spectacles have never been cleaned, they say, and any one may see they don’t want cleaning.

The truth seems to be, that Mr. Blenkinsop has found an altogether new pair of spectacles, which enable him to see in the right direction. Formerly, he could only look backwards; he now looks forwards to the grand object that all human eyes should have in view—progressive improvement.

BAPTISMAL RITUALS.

The subject of baptism having recently been pressed prominently upon public attention, it has been thought that a few curious particulars relating exclusively to the rite as anciently performed would be interesting.

In the earliest days of the Christian Church those who were admitted into it by baptism were necessarily not infants but adolescent or adult converts. These previously underwent a course of religious instruction, generally for two years. They were called during their pupilage, ‘catechumens,’[2] a name afterwards transferred to all infants before baptism. When such candidates were judged worthy to be received within the pale of the Church, their names were inscribed at the beginning of Lent, on a list of the competent or ‘illuminated.’ On Easter or Pentecost eve they were baptised, by three solemn immersions, the first of the right side, the second of the left, and the third of the face. They were confirmed at the same time, often, in addition, receiving the sacrament. Sprinkling was only resorted to in cases of the sick and bedridden, who were called _clinics_,[3] because they received the rite in bed. Baptism was at that early period accompanied by certain symbolical ceremonies long since disused. For example, milk and honey were given to the new Christian to mark his entrance into the land of promise, and as a sign of his spiritual infancy in being ‘born again;’ for milk and honey were the food of children when weaned. The three immersions were made in honour of the three persons of the Trinity; but the Arians having found in that ceremony an argument favouring the notion of distinction and plurality of natures in the Deity, Pope Gregory by a letter addressed to St. Leander of Seville, ordained that in Spain, the then stronghold of Arianism, only one immersion should be practised. This prescription was preserved and applied to the Church universal by the 6th canon of the Council of Toledo in 633. The triple immersion was, however, persisted in in Ireland to the 12th century. Infants were thus baptised by their fathers, or indeed by any other person at hand, either in water or in milk; but the custom was abolished in 1172 by the Council of Cashel.

Footnote 2:

From the participle of a Greek verb, expressing the act of receiving
rudimentary instruction.

Footnote 3:

From a Greek word signifying a bed, whence we derive the word
_clinical_.

The African churches obliged those who were to be baptised on Easter eve to bathe on Good Friday, ‘in order,’ says P. Richard, in his _Analyse des Conciles_, ‘to rid themselves of the impurities contracted during the observance of Lent before presenting themselves at the sacred font.’ The bishops and priesthood of some of the Western churches, as at Milan, in Spain, and in Wales, washed the feet of the newly baptised, in imitation of the humiliation of the Redeemer. This was forbidden in 303 by the 48th canon of the Council of Elvira.

The Baptistery of the early church was one of the _exedræ_, or out-buildings, and consisted of a porch or ante-room, where adult converts made their confession of faith, and an inner room, where the actual baptism took place. Thus it continued till the sixth century, when baptisteries began to be taken into the church itself. The font was always of wood or stone. Indeed, we find the provincial council held in Scotland, in 1225, prescribing those materials as the only ones to be used. The Church in all ages discouraged private baptism. By the 55th canon of the same Council, the water which had been used to baptise a child out of church was to be thrown into the fire, or carried immediately to the parish baptistery, that it might be employed for no other purpose; in like manner, the vessel which, had held it was to be either burnt or consecrated for church use. For many centuries superstitious virtues were attributed to water which had been used for baptism. The blind bathed their eyes in it in the hope of obtaining their sight. It was said to ‘drown the devil,’ and to purify those who had recourse to it.

Baptism was by the early Church strictly forbidden during Lent. The Council of Toledo, held in 694, ordered by its 2nd canon, that, from the commencement of the fast to Good Friday, every baptistery should be closed, and sealed up with the seal of the bishop. The Council held at Reading, Berkshire, in 1279, prescribed that infants born the week previous to each Easter and Pentecost, should be baptised only at those festivals. There is no restriction of this kind preserved by the Reformed Church; but we are admonished in the rubric that the most acceptable place and time for the ceremony is in church, no later than the first or second Sunday after birth. Sundays or holidays are suggested, because ‘the most number of people come together,’ to be edified thereby, and be witnesses of the admission of the child into the Church. Private baptism is objected to, except when need shall compel.

The practice of administering the Eucharist to the adult converts to Christianity after baptism, was in many churches improperly, during the fourth century, extended to infants. The priest dipped his fore-finger into the wine, and put it to the lips of the child to suck. This abuse of the Holy Sacrament did not survive the twelfth century. It was repeatedly forbidden by various Councils of the Church, and at length fell into desuetude.

Christening fees originated at a very early date. At first, bishops and those who had aided in the ceremony of baptism were entertained at a feast. This was afterwards commuted to an actual payment of money. Both were afterwards forbidden. The 48th canon of the Council of Elvira, held in 303, prohibits the leaving of money in the fonts, ‘that the ministers of the Church may not appear to sell that which it is their duty to give gratuitously.’ This rule was, however, as little observed in the Middle Ages as it has been since. Strype says, that in 1560 it was enjoined by the heads of the Church that, ‘to avoid contention, let the curate have the value of the “Chrisome,” not under 4_d._, and above as they can agree, and as the state of the parents may require.’ The Chrisome was the white cloth placed by the minister upon the head of a child, which had been newly anointed with chrism, or hallowed ointment composed of oil and balm, always used after baptism. The gift of this cloth was usually made by the mother at the time of Churching. To show how enduring such customs are, even after the occasion for them has passed away, we need only quote a passage from Morant’s ‘Essex.’ ‘In Denton Church there has been a custom, time out of mind, at the churching of a woman, for her to give a white cambric handkerchief to the minister as an offering.’ The same custom is kept up in Kent, as may be seen in Lewis’s History of the Isle of Thanet.

The number of sponsors for each child was prescribed by the 4th Canon of the Council of York, in 1196, to be _no more_ than three persons;—two males and one female for a boy, and two females and one male for a girl;—a rule which is still preserved. A custom sprung up afterwards, which reversed the old state of things. By little and little, large presents were looked for from sponsors, not only to the child but to its mother; the result was that there grew to be a great difficulty in procuring persons to undertake so expensive an office. Indeed, it sometimes happened that fraudulent parents had a child baptised thrice, for the sake of the godfather’s gifts. To remedy these evils, a Council held at l’Isle, in Provence, in 1288, ordered that thenceforth nothing was to be given to the baptised but a white robe. This prescription appears to have been kept for ages; Stow, in his Chronicle of King James’s Reign, says, ‘At this time, and for many ages, it was not the use and custom (as now it is) for godfathers and godmothers to give plate at the baptism of children, but only to give _christening shirts_, with little bands and cuffs, wrought either with silk or blue thread, the best of them edged with a small lace of silk and gold.’ Cups and spoons have, however, stood their ground as favourite presents to babies on such occasions, ever since. ‘Apostle spoons’—so called because a figure of one of the apostles was chased on the handle of each—were anciently given: opulent sponsors presenting the whole twelve. Those in middling circumstances gave four, and the poorer sort contented themselves with the gift of one, exhibiting the figure of any saint, in honour of whom the child received its name. Thus, in the books of the Stationers’ Company, we find under 1560, ‘a spoone the gift of Master Reginald Woolf, all gilte, with the picture of St. John.’

Shakspeare, in his Henry VIII., makes the king say, when Cranmer professes himself unworthy to be sponsor to the young princess:—

‘Come, come, my lord, you’d spare your spoons.’

Again, in Davenant’s Comedy of ‘The Wits,’ (1639):

‘My pendants, cascanets, and rings;
My christ’ning caudle-cup and spoons,
Are dissolved into that lump.’

The coral and bells is an old invention for baptismal presents. Coral was anciently considered an amulet against fascination and evil spirits.

It is to be regretted that, at the present time, the grave responsibilities of the sponsors of children is too often considered to end with the presentation of some such gifts as we have enumerated. It is not to our praise that the ties between sponsors and god-children, were much closer, and held more sacredly in times which we are pleased to call barbarous. God-children were placed not only in a state of pupilage with their sureties, but also in the position of relations. A sort of relationship was established even between the Godfathers and Godmothers; insomuch, that marriage between any such parties was forbidden under pain of severe punishment. This injunction, like many others, had it appears been sufficiently disobeyed to warrant a special canon (12th) of the Council of Compiègne, held so early as 757, which enforced the separation of all those sponsors and God-children of both sexes who had intermarried, and the Church refused the rites of marriage to the women so separated. A century after (815) the Council of Mayence not only reinforced these restrictions and penalties, but added others.

ARCTIC HEROES.

A FRAGMENT OF NAVAL HISTORY.

SCENE, _a stupendous region of icebergs and snow. The bare mast of a
half-buried ship stands among the rifts and ridges. The figures of
two men, covered closely with furs and skins, slowly emerge from
beneath the winter-housing of the deck, and descend upon the snow
by an upper ladder, and steps cut below in the frozen wall of
snow. They advance._

_1st Man._ We are out of hearing now. Give thy heart words.

[_They walk on in silence some steps further, and then pause._

_2nd Man._ Here ‘midst the sea’s unfathomable ice,
Life-piercing cold, and the remorseless night
Which never ends, nor changes its dead face,
Save in the ’ghast smile of the hopeless moon,
Must slowly close our sum of wasted hours;
And with them all the enterprising dreams,
Efforts, endurance, and resolve, which make
The power and glory of us Englishmen.

_1st Man._ It _may_ be so.

_2nd Man._ Oh, doubt not but it must.
Day after day, week crawling after week,
So slowly that they scarcely seem to move,
Nor we to know it, till our calendar
Shows us that months have lapsed away, and left
Our drifting time, while here our bodies lie
Like melancholy blots upon the snow.
Thus have we lived, and gradually seen,
By calculations which appear to mock
Our hearts with their false figures, that ’tis now
Three years since we were cut off from the world
By these impregnable walls of solid ocean!

_1st Man._ All this is true: the physical elements
We thought to conquer, are too strong for man.

_2nd Man._ We have felt the crush of battle side by side;
Seen our best friends, with victory in their eyes,
Suddenly smitten down, a mangled heap,
And thought our own turn might be next; yet never
Drooped we in spirit, or such horror felt
As in the voiceless tortures of this place,
Which freezes up the mind.

_1st Man._ Not yet.

_2nd Man._ I feel it.
Death, flying red-eyed from the cannon’s mouth,
Were child’s play to confront, compared with this.
Inch by inch famine in the silent frost—
The cold anatomies of our dear friends,
One by one carried in their rigid sheets
To lay beneath the snow—till he that’s last,
Creeps to the lonely horror of his berth
Within the vacant ship, and while the bears
Grope round and round, thinks of his distant home—
Those dearest to him—glancing rapidly
Through his past life—then with a wailful sigh
And a brief prayer, his soul becomes a blank.

_1st Man._ This is despair—I’ll hear no more of it.
We have provisions still.

_2nd Man._ And for how long?

_1st Man._ A flock of wild birds may pass over us,
And some our shots may reach.

_2nd Man._ And by this chance
Find food for one day more.

_1st Man._ Yes, and thank God;
For the next day may preservation come,
And rescue from old England.

_2nd Man._ All our fuel
Is nearly gone; and as the last log burns
And falls in ashes, so may we foresee
The frozen circle sitting round.

_1st Man._ Nay, nay—
Our boats, loose spars, our masts, and half our decks
Must serve us ere that pass. But, if indeed
Nothing avail, and no help penetrate
To this remote place, inaccessible
Perchance for years, except to some wild bird—
We came here knowing all this might befal,
And set our lives at stake. God’s will be done.
I, too, have felt the horrors of our fate:
Jammed in a moving field of solid ice,
Borne onward day and night we knew not where,
Till the loud cracking sounds reverberating
Far distant, were soon followed by the rending
Of the vast pack, whose heaving blocks and wedges,
Like crags broke loose, all rose to our destruction
As by some ghastly instinct. Then the hand
Of winter smote the all-congealing air,
And with its freezing tempest piled on high
These massy fragments which environ us:—
Cathedrals many-spired, by lightning riven—
Sharp-angled chaos-heaps of palaced cities,
With splintered pyramids, and broken towers
That yawn for ever at the bursting moon
And her four pallid flame-spouts. Now, appalled
By the long roar o’ the cloud-like avalanche—
Now, by the stealthy creeping of the glaciers
In silence tow’rds our frozen ships. So Death
Hath often whispered to me in the night;
And I have seen him in the Aurora-gleam
Smile as I rose and came upon the deck;
Or when the icicle’s prismatic glance—
Bright, flashing,—and then, colourless, unmoved ice—
Emblem’d our passing life, and its cold end.
Oh, friend in many perils, fail not now!
Am I not, e’en as thou art, utterly sick
Of my own heavy heart, and loading clothes?—
A mind—that in its firmest hour hath fits
Of madness for some change, that shoot across
Its steadfastness, and scarce are trampled down.
Yet, friend, I will not let my spirit sink,
Nor shall mine eyes, e’en with snow-blindness veiled,
Man’s great prerogative of inward sight
Forego, nor cease therein to speculate
On England’s feeling for her countrymen;
Whereof relief will some day surely come.

_2nd Man._ I well believe it; but perhaps too late.

_1st Man._ Then, if too late, one noble task remains,
And one consoling thought. We, to the last,
With firmness, order, and considerate care,
Will act as though our death-beds were at home,
Grey heads with honour sinking to the tomb;
So future times shall record bear that we,
Imprisoned in these frozen horrors, held
Our sense of duty, both to man and God.

_The muffled beat of the ship’s bell sounds for evening prayers._
_The two men return: they ascend the steps in the snow—then the
ladder—and disappear beneath the snow-covered housing of the
deck._

A CORONER’S INQUEST.

If there appeared a paragraph in the newspapers, stating that her
Majesty’s representative, the Lord Chief Justice of the Queen’s Bench,
had held a solemn Court in the parlour of the ‘Elephant and
Tooth-pick,’ the reader would rightly conceive that the Crown and
dignity of our Sovereign Lady had suffered some derogation. Yet an
equal abasement daily takes place without exciting especial wonder.
The subordinates of the Lord Chief Justice of the Queen’s Bench (who
is, by an old law, the Premier Coroner of all England) habitually
preside at houses of public entertainment; yet they are no less
delegates of Royalty—as the name of their office implies[4]—than the
ermined dignitary himself, when surrounded with all the pomp and
circumstance of the law’s majesty at Westminster. This is quite
characteristic of our thoroughly commercial nation. An action about a
money-debt is tried in an imposing manner in a spacious edifice, and
with only too great an excess of formality; but for an inquest into
the sacrifice of a mere human life, ‘the worst inn’s worst room’ is
deemed good enough. In order rightly to determine whether Jones owes
Smith five pounds ten, the Goddess of Justice is surrounded with the
most imposing insignia, and worshipped in an appropriate temple: but
when she is invoked to decide why a human spirit,

Footnote 4:

It is derived from _a coronâ_ (from the crown), because the coroner,
says Coke, “hath conusance in some pleas which are called _placita
coronæ_.”

‘Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d,
No reckoning made, is sent to its account
With all its imperfections on its head;’

she is thrust into the ‘Hole in the Wall,’ the ‘Bag o’ Nails,’ or the
parlour of the ‘Two Spies.’

Desirous of having aural and ocular demonstration of the curious
manner in which the office of Coroner is now fulfilled, we were
attracted, a few weeks since, to the Old Drury Tavern, in Vinegar
Yard, Drury Lane. Having made our way to a small parlour, we perceived
the Majesty of England, as personated on this occasion, enveloped in
an ordinary surtout, sitting at the head of a table, and surrounded by
a knot of good-humoured faces, who might, if judged from mere
appearances, have rallied round their president for some social
purpose—only that the cigars and spirits and water had not yet come
in. There was nothing official to be seen but a few pens, a sheet or
two of paper, an inkstand, and a parish beadle.

When we entered, the Coroner was holding a friendly conversation with
some of the jury, the beadle, and the gentlemen of the press,
respecting the inferiority of the accommodation; and, considering the
number of persons present, and the accessions expected from more
jurymen, parochial officers, and witnesses, the subject was suggested
naturally enough: for the private apartment of the landlord was of
exceedingly moderate dimensions; and that had been appropriated as the
temporary Court.

Here then, to a back parlour of the Old Drury Tavern, Vinegar Yard,
Drury Lane, London, the Queen’s representative was consigned—by no
fault of his own, but from that of a system of which he is rather a
victim than a promoter—to institute one of the most important
inquiries which the law of England prescribes. A human being had been
prematurely sent into eternity, and the coroner was called upon—amidst
several implements of conviviality, the odour of gin and the smell of
tobacco-smoke—‘to inquire in this manner: that is, to wit, if they
[the witnesses] know where the person was slain, whether it were in
any house, field, bed, tavern, or company, and who were there; who are
culpable, either of the act, or of the force; and who were present,
either men or women, and of what age soever they be, if they can speak
or have any discretion; and how many soever be found culpable they
shall be taken and delivered to the sheriff, and shall be committed to
the gaol.’ So runs the clause of the act of parliament, still in force
by which the coroner and jury were now assembled. It is the second
statute of the fourth year of Edward I., and is the identical law
which is discussed by the grave-diggers in Hamlet.

The pleasant colloquy about the size of the room ended in a resolution
to adjourn the Court to the ‘Two Spies,’ in a neighbouring alley. Time
appeared, throughout the proceedings, to be as valuable as space, and
the rest of the jurors having dropped in, the coroner—with a bible
supplied from the bar,—at once delivered the oath to the foreman. The
other jurors were rapidly sworn in batches, upon the Old Drury Bible,
under an abridged dispensation administered, if our memory be correct,
by the beadle.

‘Now, then, gentlemen,’ said the coroner, ‘we’ll view the body.’

Not without alacrity the entire company left their confined quarters
to breathe such air as is vouchsafed in Vinegar Yard. The subject of
inquiry lay at a baker’s shop, ‘a few doors round the corner,’—to use
the topographical formula of the parish functionary—and thither he
ushered us. A few of the window shutters of the shop were up, but in
all other respects there was as little to indicate a house of death as
there was to show it to be a house of mourning. If the journeyman had
not been standing at the end of the counter in his holiday coat, it
would have seemed as if business was going on as usual. There was the
same tempting display of tarts, the same heaps of biscuits, the same
supply of loaves, the same ranges of flour in paper bags as is to be
observed in ordinary bakers’ shops on ordinary occasions. Yet the
mistress of this particular baker’s shop lay dead only a few paces
within, and its master was in gaol on suspicion of having murdered
her.

Through a parlour and a sort of passage with a bed and a sink in
it,the jury were shown into a confined kitchen. Here, on a mahogany
dining-table, lay the remains covered with a dirty sheet. To describe
the spectacle which presented itself when the beadle, with
business-like immobility turned down the covering, does not happily
fall within our present object. It is, however, necessary to say that
it presented evidences of continued ill-usage from blows and kicks,
not to be beheld without strong indignation. Yet this was not all.

‘The cause of death,’ said the beadle—_his_ mind was quite made up—‘is
on the back; it’s covered with bruises: but I suppose you won’t want
to see that, gentlemen.’

By no means. Everybody had seen enough; for they were surrounded by
whatever could increase distress and engender disgust. The apartment
was so small, that the table left only room for the jurors to edge
round it one by one; and it was hardly possible to do this, without
actual contact with the head or feet of the corpse. A gridiron and
other black utensils were hanging against the wall, and could only be
escaped by the exercise on the part of the spectators of great
ingenuity of motion. This and the bed-place (bed-_room_ is no word for
it) indicated squalid poverty; but the scene was changed in the
parlour. There, appearances were at least kept up. It was filled with
decent furniture—even elegancies; including a pianoforte and a couple
of portraits.

These strange evidences of refinement only brought out the squalor,
smallness, and unfitness for any part of a judicial inquiry of the
inner apartments, into more glaring relief. Surely so important a
function as that of a coroner and his jury should not be conducted
amidst such a scene! Besides other obvious objections, the danger of
keeping corpses in confined apartments, and in close neighbourhoods,
was here strongly exemplified. The smell was so ‘close’ and
insanitary, that the first man who entered the den where the body lay,
caused the window to be opened. Two children, the offspring of the
victim and the accused, lived in these apartments; and above stairs
the house was crowded with lodgers, to all of whom any sort of
infection would have proved the more disastrous from living next door,
as it were, to Death. It is terrible to reflect that every decease
happening among the myriads of the population a little lower in
circumstances than this baker, deals around it its proportion of
destruction to the living, from the same causes. True, that had it
been impossible to retain the body where death occurred—as chances
when several persons live in the same room—it would have been removed.
But where.—The coroner and jury would have had to view it in the
tap-room of a public-house.

There is another objection—all-powerful in the eyes of a lawyer. He
recognises as a first necessity that the jurors should have no
opportunity of communicating with witnesses, except when before the
Court. But here the melancholy honours of the baker’s shop and parlour
were performed by the two persons from whose evidence the cause of
death was to be chiefly elicited;—the journeyman and a female relative
of the deceased, who were in the house when the last blows were dealt,
and when the woman died. They received the fifteen jurymen who were
presently to judge of their testimony; and there was nothing but the
strong sense of propriety which actuated these gentlemen on the
present occasion, to prevent the witnesses from telling their own
story privately in their own way, to any one or half dozen of the
inquest, and thus to give a premature bent to opinions, the materials
for forming which, ought to be strictly reserved for the public Court.
Many examples can be supplied in illustration of this evil. We select
one:—Some years ago, an old woman in the most wretched part of
Westminster, was found dead in her bed—strangled. When the Coroner and
jury went to view the body, they were ushered by a young female—a
relative—who lived with the deceased. She explained there and then all
about the death. When the Court re-assembled, she was—chiefly, it was
understood, in consequence of what had previously passed—examined as
first and principal witness, and upon her evidence, the verdict
arrived at, was ‘Temporary insanity.’ The case, however, subsequently
passed through more formal judicial ordeals, and the result was, that
the coroner’s prime witness was hanged for the _murder_ of the old
woman. We must have it distinctly understood that not the faintest
shade of parallel exists between the two cases. We bring them together
solely to illustrate the evils of a system.

On passing into the baker’s parlour, dumb witnesses presented
themselves, which—properly or improperly—must have had their effect on
the promoters of the inquiry. The piano indicated hours formerly
spent, and thoughts once indulged, which, when imagined by minds fresh
from the appalling reality in the squalid kitchen, must have excited
new throes of indignation and pity. One portrait was that of the
bruised and crushed corpse when living and young. Then she must have
been comely; now no feature could be recognised as ever having been
human. Then, she was cleanly and neatly dressed, and, if the pictured
smile might be trusted, happy; now, she lay amidst dirt, the victim of
long, long ill-usage and lingering misery, ended in premature death.
The other, was a likeness of her husband. Had words of love ever
passed between the originals of those painted effigies? Had they ever
courted? It seemed that one of the jurors was inwardly asking some
such question while gazing at the portraits, for he was visibly
affected.

We all at length made our way to the ‘Two Spies’ in Whitehart Yard,
Brydges Street. The accommodation afforded was a little more spacious
than those of the Old Drury; but the delegated Majesty of the Crown
had no dignity imparted to it from the coroner’s figure being brought
out in relief by a clothes-horse and table cloth which were, during
the inquiry, placed behind him to serve as a fire-screen. Neither did
the case of stuffed birds, the sampler of Moses in the bulrushes, the
picture of the licensed victuallers’ school, or the portraits of the
rubicund host and of his ‘good lady,’ tend to impress the minds of
jury, witnesses, or spectators, with that awe for the supremacy of the
Law which a court of justice is expected to inspire.

The circumstances as detailed by the witnesses are already familiar to
the readers of newspapers; but from the insecutive manner in which the
evidence was produced, it is difficult to frame a coherent narrative.
It all tended to prove that the husband had for several years
exercised great harshness towards his wife. That boxing her ears and
kicking her were among his ‘habits.’ On the Friday previous to her
decease, the journeyman had been, as usual, ‘bolted down’ in the
bake-house for the night, (such, he said, being the custom in the
trade) and from eleven o’clock till three in the morning he heard a
great noise overhead as of two persons quarrelling, and of one person
dragging the other across the room. There were cries of distress from
the deceased woman. Another witness—a second cousin of the wife—called
on Saturday afternoon. She found the wife in a pitiable state from
ill-usage and want of rest. Her left ear and all that part of the head
was much bruised. There were cuts, and the hair was matted with
congealed blood. The husband was told how much she was injured, but he
did not appear to take any notice of it. A trait of the dread in which
the woman lived of the man was here mentioned; she asked the witness
to ask her husband to allow her to lie down. She dared not prefer so
reasonable a request herself; although she had been up all the
previous night being beaten. He refused. The cousin sat down to dinner
with the wretched pair; only for the purpose of being between them to
prevent further violence, for she had dined. She remained until
half-past three o’clock, and during that interval the husband
frequently boxed his wife’s ears as hard as he could; and once kicked
her with great force. Her usual remonstrance was, ‘Man alive, don’t
touch me.’ The visitor returned in the evening, and she, with the
journeyman, saw another brutal attack, some minutes after which the
victim fell as if in a fit. She was assisted into an inner room, sank
down and never rose again. She lay till the following Sunday morning
in a state of insensibility, and no attempt had been made to procure
surgical assistance. A practitioner at last was summoned, gave no
hope, and the poor creature died on Monday morning. The post mortem
examination, described by the surgeon, revealed the cause of death in
the blows at the side of the head, which he said was like ‘beefsteaks
when beaten by cooks.’ No trace of habitual drunkenness appeared. The
deceased had been, in the course of the inquiry, charged with that.

A lawyer would have felt especially fidgetty, while these facts were
being elicited. The questions were put in an undecided rambling
manner, and were so interrupted by half-made remarks from the jurors
and other parties in the room, that it was a wonder how the report of
the proceedings, which appeared in the morning newspapers, could have
been so cleverly cleared as it was of the chaff from which it was
winnowed. One or two circumstances occurred during this time which
tended to throw over the whole affair the air of an ill-played farce.
At an interesting point of the evidence, the door was opened, and a
scream from a female voice announced ‘Please sir, the beadle’s
wanted!’ There were four gentlemen sitting on a horse-hair sofa close
behind some of the jury, with whom more than once they entered into
conversation, doubtless about the case in hand. The way in which the
coroner took notice of this breach of every judisprudential rule, was
extremely characteristic: he said, in effect, that there was, perhaps,
no actual harm in it, but it _might_ be objected to—the parties
conversing might be relatives of the accused. In fact, he mildly
insinuated that such unprivileged communications might warp the
jurymen’s judgments—that’s all!

After the coroner had summed up, the jury returned a verdict of
manslaughter against the husband. The Queen’s representative then
retired, and so did the jury and the beadle; a little extra business
was done at the bar of the ‘Two Spies,’ and, to use a reporter’s pet
phrase, ‘the proceedings terminated.’

It is far from our desire, in describing this particular inquest, in
any way to disparage—supposing anything we have said can be construed
into disparagement—any person or persons concerned in it directly or
remotely. Our wish is to point out the exceeding looseness,
informality, and difficulty of ensuring sound judgment, which the
system occasions. Indeed we were told by a competent authority that
the proceedings at the Old Drury and ‘Two Spies’ taverns, formed an
orderly and superior specimen of their class.

There is a mischief of some gravity, which we have yet to notice. The
essential check upon all judicial or private dereliction is publicity,
and publicity gained through the press in _all_ cases which require
it; but the existing system gives the coroner the power of excluding
reporters. He can, if he pleases, make a Star Chamber of his court,
hold it in a private house, and conduct it in secret. Instances—though
very rare ones—can be adduced of this having been actually done. Here
opens a door to another abuse;—it is known that a certain few among
newspaper hangers-on—persons only connected with the press by the
precarious and slender tenure of ‘a penny-a-line’—find it profitable
to attend inquests—not for legitimate purposes—for their ‘copy’ is
seldom inserted by editors—but to obtain money from relatives and
parties interested in the deceased for what they are pleased to call
‘suppressing’ their reports. This generally happens in cases which
from their having no public interest whatever would not, under any
circumstances, be admitted into the crowded columns of the journals;
for we can with confidence say that any case in which the public
interests are likely to be staked, once before the editors of any
London Journal, and supplied by a gentleman of their own
establishment, no power on earth could suppress it. It has happened
again occasionally that, from the suddenness with which the coroner is
summoned, and the slovenly manner in which his office is performed, an
inquest that ought to have been made public has wholly escaped the
knowledge of newspaper conductors and their accredited reporters, and
has thus passed over in silence.

Let us here put up another guard against misconception. No imputation
_can_ rest upon any accredited member of the press; the high state
dignities which some men who have been reporters now so well support,
are a guarantee against that. Neither do we wish to undervalue the
important services sometimes performed by occasional or ‘penny-a-line’
reporters; among whom there are honourable and clever men. We only
point out a small body of exceptional characters who are no more than
what we have described—‘hangers-on’ of the press.

We now proceed to suggest a remedy for the inherent vices of
‘Crowner’s quests.’

In the report of the Board of Health on intramural interments, upon
which a bill now before Parliament is founded, it is proposed to erect
in convenient parts of London eight reception-houses for the dead,
previous to interment in the cemeteries to be established. This will
remove the mortal remains from that immediate and fatal contact—fatal,
morally as well as physically—which is compulsory among the poorer
classes under the existing system of sepulture. It appears that of the
deaths which take place in the metropolis, in upwards of 20,000
instances the corpse must be kept, during the interval between the
death and the interment, in the same room in which the surviving
members of the family live and sleep; while of the 8,000 deaths every
year from epidemic diseases, by far the greater part happen under the
circumstances just described.

If from these causes the necessity for dead-houses is so great when no
inquest is necessary, how much stronger is it when the services of the
coroner are requisite? The reason given for the peripatetic nature of
the office, is the assumed necessity of the jury seeing the bodies on
the spot and in the circumstances of death. But that such a necessity
is unreal was proved on the inquest we have been detailing, by the
fact of the remains having been lifted from the bed where life ceased,
to a table, and having been opened by the surgeons. Surely, removal to
a wholesome and convenient reception-house, would not disturb such
appearances as may be presumed to form evidence. As it is, the only
place among the poor in which medical men can perform the important
duty of examination by _post mortem_ dissection is a room crowded with
inmates—or the tap-room of the nearest tavern.

To preserve, then, a degree of order, dignity, and solemnity equal at
least to that which is maintained to try an action for debt, and to
prevent the possibility of any ‘private’ dealings, we would strongly
urge that a suitable Coroner’s Court-house be attached to each of the
proposed reception-houses. A clause to this effect can be easily
introduced into the new bill. With such accommodation the coroner
could perform his office in a manner worthy of a delegate of the
Crown, and no such informalities as tend to intercept and taint the
pure stream of Justice could continue to exist.

FRANCIS JEFFREY.

JEFFREY was a year younger than SCOTT, whom he outlived eighteen
years, and with whose career his own had some points of resemblance.
They came of the same middle-class stock, and had played together as
lads in the High School ‘yard’ before they met as advocates in the
Court of Session. The fathers of both were connected with that Court;
and from childhood, both were devoted to the law. But Scott’s boyish
infirmity imprisoned him in Edinburgh, while Jeffrey was let loose to
Glasgow University, and afterwards passed up to Queen’s College,
Oxford. The boys, thus separated, had no remembrance of having
previously met, when they saw each other at the Speculative Society in
1791.

The Oxford of that day suited Jeffrey ill. It suited few people well
who cared for anything but cards and claret. Southey, who came just
after him, tells us that the Greek he took there he left there, nor
ever passed such unprofitable months; and Lord Malmesbury, who had
been there but a little time before him, wonders how it was that so
many men should make their way in the world creditably, after leaving
a place that taught nothing but idleness and drunkenness. But Jeffrey
was not long exposed to its temptations. He left after the brief
residence of a single term; and what in after life he remembered most
vividly in connection with it, seems to have been the twelve days’
hard travelling between Edinburgh and London which preceded his
entrance at Queen’s. Some seventy years before, another Scotch lad, on
his way to become yet more famous in literature and law, had taken
nearly as many weeks to perform the same journey; but, between the
schooldays of Mansfield and of Jeffrey, the world had not been
resting.

It was enacting its greatest modern incident, the first French
Revolution, when the young Scotch student returned to Edinburgh and
changed his College gown for that of the advocate. Scott had the start
of him in the Court of Session by two years, and had become rather
active and distinguished in the Speculative Society before Jeffrey
joined it. When the latter, then a lad of nineteen, was introduced,
(one evening in 1791), he observed a heavy-looking young man
officiating as secretary, who sat solemnly at the bottom of the table
in a huge woollen night-cap, and who, before the business of the night
began, rose from his chair, and, with imperturbable gravity seated on
as much of his face as was discernible from the wrappings of the
‘portentous machine’ that enveloped it, apologised for having left
home with a bad toothache. This was his quondam schoolfellow Scott.
Perhaps Jeffrey was pleased with the mingled enthusiasm for the
speculative, and regard for the practical, implied in the woollen
night-cap; or perhaps he was interested by the Essay on Ballads which
the hero of the night-cap read in the course of the evening: but
before he left the meeting he sought an introduction to Mr. Walter
Scott, and they were very intimate for many years afterwards.

The Speculative Society dealt with the usual subjects of elocution and
debate prevalent in similar places then and since; such as, whether
there ought to be an Established Religion, and whether the Execution
of Charles I. was justifiable, and if Ossian’s poems were authentic?
It was not a fraternity of speculators by any means of an alarming or
dangerous sort. John Allen and his friends, at this very time, were
spouting forth active sympathy for French Republicanism at Fortune’s
Tavern, under immediate and watchful superintendence of the Police;
James Macintosh was parading the streets with Horne Tooke’s colours in
his hat; James Montgomery was expiating in York Jail his exulting
ballad on the Fall of the Bastille; and Southey and Coleridge, in
despair of old England, had completed the arrangements of their
youthful colony for a community of property, and proscription of
everything selfish, on the banks of the Susquehana;—but the
Speculative orators rarely probed the sores of the body politic deeper
than an inquiry into the practical advantages of belief in a future
state? and whether it was for the interest of Britain to maintain the
balance of Europe? or if knowledge could be too much disseminated
among the lower ranks of the people?

In short, nothing of the extravagance of the time, on either side, is
associable with the outset of Jeffrey’s career. As little does he seem
to have been influenced, on the one hand, by the democratic foray of
some two hundred convention delegates into Edinburgh in 1792, as, on
the other, by the prominence of his father’s name to a protest of
frantic high-tory defiance; and he was justified not many years since
in referring with pride to the fact that, at the opening of his public
life, his view of the character of the first French revolution, and of
its probable influence on other countries, had been such as to require
little modification during the whole of his subsequent career. The
precision and accuracy of his judgment had begun to show itself thus
early. At the crude young Jacobins, so soon to ripen into Quarterly
Reviewers, who were just now coquetting with Mary Woolstonecraft, or
making love to the ghost of Madame Roland, or branding as worthy of
the bowstring the tyrannical enormities of Mr. Pitt, he could afford
to laugh from the first. From the very first he had the strongest
liberal tendencies, but restrained them so wisely that he could
cultivate them well.

He joined the band of youths who then sat at the feet of Dugald
Stewart, and whose first incentive to distinction in the more
difficult paths of knowledge, as well as their almost universal
adoption of the liberal school of politics, are in some degree
attributable to the teaching of that distinguished man. Among them
were Brougham and Horner, who had played together from boyhood in
Edinburgh streets, had joined the Speculative on the same evening six
years after Jeffrey (who in Brougham soon found a sharp opponent on
colonial and other matters), and were still fast friends. Jeffrey’s
father, raised to a deputy clerk of session, now lived on a third or
fourth flat in Buchanan’s Court in the Lawn Market, where the worthy
old gentleman kept two women servants and a man at livery; but where
the furniture does not seem to have been of the soundest. This fact
his son used to illustrate by an anecdote of the old gentleman eagerly
setting-to at a favourite dinner one day, with the two corners of the
table cloth tied round his neck to protect his immense professional
frills, when the leg of his chair gave way, and he tumbled back on the
floor with all the dishes, sauces, and viands a-top of him. Father and
son lived here together, till the latter took for his first wife the
daughter of the Professor of Hebrew in the University of St. Andrew,
and moved to an upper story in another part of town. He had been
called to the bar in 1794, and was married eight years afterward. He
had not meanwhile obtained much practice, and the elevation implied in
removal to an upper flat is not of the kind that a young Benedict
covets. But distinction of another kind was at length at hand.

One day early in 1802, ‘in the eighth or ninth story or flat in
Buccleugh Place, the elevated residence of the then Mr. Jeffrey,’ Mr.
Jeffrey had received a visit from Horner and Sydney Smith, when
Sydney, at this time a young English curate temporarily resident in
Edinburgh, preaching, teaching, and joking with a flow of wit,
humanity, and sense that fascinated everybody, started the notion of
the Edinburgh Review. The two Scotchmen at once voted the Englishman
its editor, and the notion was communicated to John Archibald Murray
(Lord Advocate after Jeffrey, long years afterward), John Allen (then
lecturing on medical subjects at the University, but who went abroad
before he could render any essential service), and Alexander Hamilton
(afterwards Sanscrit professor at Haileybury). This was the first
council; but it was extended, after a few days, till the two Thomsons
(John and Thomas, the physician and the advocate), Thomas Brown (who
succeeded to Dugald Stewart’s chair), and Henry Brougham, were
admitted to the deliberations. Horner’s quondam playfellow was an ally
too potent to be obtained without trouble; and, even thus early, had
not a few characteristics in common with the Roman statesman and
orator whom it was his greatest ambition in after life to resemble,
and of whom Shakspeare has told us that he never followed anything
that other men began.

‘You remember how cheerfully Brougham approved of our plan at first,’
wrote Jeffrey to Horner, in April, in the thick of anxious
preparations for the start, ‘and agreed to give us an article or two
without hesitation. Three or four days ago I proposed two or three
books that I thought would suit him; when he answered, with perfect
good humour, that he had changed his view of our plan a little, and
rather thought now that he should decline to have any connection with
it.’ This little coquetry was nevertheless overcome; and before the
next six months were over, Brougham had become an efficient and
zealous member of the band.

It is curious to see how the project hung fire at first. Jeffrey had
nearly finished four articles, Horner had partly written four, and
more than half the number was printed; and yet well nigh the other
half had still to be written. The memorable fasciculus at last
appeared in November, after a somewhat tedious gestation of nearly ten
months; having been subject to what Jeffrey calls so ‘miserable a
state of backwardness’ and so many ‘symptoms of despondency,’ that
Constable had to delay the publication some weeks beyond the day first
fixed. Yet as early as April had Sydney Smith completed more than half
of what he contributed, while nobody else had put pen to paper; and
shortly after the number appeared he was probably not sorry to be
summoned, with his easy pen and his cheerful wit, to London, and to
abandon the cares of editorship to Jeffrey.

No other choice could have been made. That first number settled the
point. It is easy to discover that Jeffrey’s estimation in Edinburgh
had not, up to this time, been in any just proportion to his powers;
and that, even with those who knew him best, his playful and sportive
fancy sparkled too much to the surface of his talk to let them see the
grave deep currents that ran underneath. Every one now read with
surprise the articles attributed to him. Sydney had yielded him the
place of honour, and he had vindicated his right to it. He had thrown
out a new and forcible style of criticism, with a fearless,
unmisgiving, and unhesitating courage. Objectors might doubt or cavil
at the opinions expressed; but the various and comprehensive
knowledge, the subtle argumentative genius, the brilliant and definite
expression, there was no disputing or denying. A fresh and startling
power was about to make itself felt in literature.