Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 389, March 1848. Various

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 63, No. 389, March 1848

cherished associations are with these unlit hours – who prefer the night thoughts to the day dreams. But to all, the crimes peculiar to different nations are a large part of the knowledge which man may profitably have of his race. In the history of its great criminals, a nation's character is drawn, as it were, colossally, with the broadest brush, and in the deepest shadows. National virtues have delicate and subtle tints, and exquisitely minute shadings, inviting to a nearer view – like Carlo Dolci's Madonnas, or Constable's forest landscapes: the crimes of a nation present the character of its people, as they rise from the dead in Michael Angelo's Last Judgment. The ordinary vices of men have a certain vulgar air of uniformity; but each great crime is a broad dash of the national character of the people among whom it was committed. The Cenci, and Joanna of Naples were of Italy. It was in Holland that two great and virtuous statesmen were torn to pieces by the mob. The dirk, long buried beyond the Grampians, has re-appeared across the Atlantic in the shape of the bowie-knife. The country of Woldemar and the sorrows of Werther produced that most amiable and sentimental of murderesses, Madame Zwanziger, who loved and was beloved wherever she went; so sensitive, so sympathising, so sedulous, so studious of the wants of those by whom she was surrounded, so disinterestedly patient; she had but one peculiarity to distinguish her from an angel of light – it was an unfortunate propensity to poison people! We read in the Causes Célèbres, of a Bluebeard who slew a succession of wives by tickling them till they died in convulsions; and at once we are reminded of that populace who are said to partake of the natures of the ape and the tiger. The people who, for more centuries than are included in the events of European history, have been resolved into the mysterious classification of castes, produced those equally mysterious criminals the Thugs, for whose deeds our so utterly different habits and ideas are quite incapable of finding or conceiving a motive. Our own country produced the assassinations of Rizzio, Regent Murray, and Archbishop Sharpe – all pregnant with marked national characteristics; aristocratic pride, revenge of wrong, and fanatical fury. We propose to offer for the amusement or instruction – which he pleases – of our reader, a few more records of Scottish crimes, not probably all so conspicuously known to the general reader as the three we have just alluded to, yet not, we trust, without something to commend them to notice, as characteristic of the country and the age in which they were respectively enacted.

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1

Vide Notes to Pope's Dunciad, book iii.

2

Italian Sketches, No. V., August 1843.

3

Epistle to the Hebrews, v. 13, 14.

4

In an otherwise admirable lecture on schools, which was lately delivered by Professor Blount, at Cambridge, we were surprised to hear a general commendation passed on these books. We feel persuaded, that neither the gravity of the class nor the approval

1

Vide Notes to Pope's Dunciad, book iii.

2

Italian Sketches, No. V., August 1843.

3

Epistle to the Hebrews, v. 13, 14.

4

5

Notwithstanding their number, we would suggest one more, the "corrective alphabet," in which all the symbols should stand representative for objects agreeable to babes, and, ex. gr., after their innocent lips have been made to falter out Herod's formidable name, we would point to ours, where —

H stands for honey, so sweet and so good

6

(Les faux dieux.)

7

"We were not" (says Jeremy Taylor) "like women and children when they are affrighted with fire in their clothes; we shook off the coal, indeed, but not our garments; lest we should expose our Church to that nakedness which the excellent men of our sister Churches complained to be among themselves."

8

Bellarmine asserts (and who but a heretic shall dispute it with him?) that men are bound so far to submit their consciences to the Pope, as even to believe virtue to be bad and vice to be good, if it shall please his Holiness to say so. (Bellar. de Rom. Pontif, lib. iv. cap. v.) When things came to this pass, were we not justified in the insertion of that rough deprecatory clause that stood in our Litany – "From the tyranny of the Bishop of Rome, and all his detestable enormities, Good Lord deliver us!"

9

"We must seek to enter into the real divine unity; if not, the pseudo unity to which Mr Newman would bring us back will be attempted once more among us; only to be followed, when its hollowness, its nothingness, its implicit infidelity, is laid bare, by an explicit infidelity, an anarchical unity, without a centre, without a God." (Maurice's Lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews, p. 111.)

10

Imitated from Juvenal, Satire viii.

11

It is singular to observe how the "votiva paries," in the churches of Papal Rome, are hung with similar offerings to those which formerly ornamented her temples in Pagan times. We possess several of these ancient offerings; inter alia– a uterus and a mamma, in terra cotta, from the Temple of Elvina Ceres at Aquinum, and an abortion, in lead, from the same source.

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