education!" Some theatrical celebrities | the colonel receiving his supplies with a managed, nevertheless, to be both brief note running: Boyd-beef- Brown." and intelligible. When Knight, by advice Talleyrand acknowledged a pathetic letof an admirer, offered his professional ter from a lady friend announcing her services to Tate Wilkinson, the manager widowhood, with a note of two words: replied: "SIR-I am not acquainted "Hélas! madame!" And when the with any Mr. Phillips except a Quaker, easily consoled dame wrote not very long and he is the last man in the world to re- afterwards soliciting his influence on becommend an actor to my theatre; I don't half of an officer she was about to marry, want you." Knight retorted: "I should he merely replied "Ho! ho! madame ! as soon think of applying to a Methodist More satisfactory to the recipient was parson to preach for my benefit, as to a Lord Eldon's note to his friend Dr. Quaker to recommend me to Mr. Wilkin- Fisher of the Charterhouse: "DEAR son; I don't want to come." Twelve FISHER- I cannot, to-day, give you the months after, the comedian received an- preferment for which you ask. Your other epistle: "Mr. Methodist Parson, I sincere friend.- ELDON. (Turn over) — have a living that produces twenty-five I gave it you yesterday." Pleasant to shillings a week: will you hold forth? all parties concerned was the correspondT. W." And the pair made a bargain of ence between the Archbishop of York it. Some of these epistolary crackers are and the Bishop of Cork: "DEAR CORK very amusing. Lord Berkeley wishing to Please ordain Stanhope. YORK." apprise the Duke of Dorset of his "DEAR YORK Stanhope is ordained.changed condition, wrote: "DEAR DOR- CORK.” SET — I have just been married, and am When a member of Lord North's adthe happiest dog alive.- BERKELEY." ministration, Fox one night took the libHis interesting news being acknowl-erty of walking into one lobby while his edged with: "DEAR BERKELEY- Every chief went into the other. As he sat on dog has his day. - DORSET." Mr. Ken- the ministerial bench the next evening, dall, sometime Uncle Sam's Postmaster- one of the door-keepers handed him a general, wanting some information as to note. Upon opening it, the rebellious the source of a river, sent the following politician read: His Majesty has note to a village postmaster: "SIR- thought proper to order a new CommisThis department desires to know how far sion of the Treasury, in which I do not the Tombigbee river runs up? - Respect- find the name of Charles James Fox.— fully yours, &c." By return mail came: NORTH." Not more agreeable to the re"SIR-The Tombigbee does not run up cipient was Henry Drummond's answer at all; it runs down.- Very respectfully to a letter asking him to join the advocates yours, &c." Kendall not appreciating his of the Maine Liquor Law: "SIR-I subordinate's humour, wrote again: "SIR think the Maine Liquor Law perfectly deYour appointment as postmaster is re- testable, and will do my best to prevent voked; you will turn over the funds, &c. its being adopted here. Yours, H. DRUMpertaining to your office to your succes- MOND." As a rule, a man with a grievsor." Not at all disturbed by his sum-ance is too proud of his wrongs to be lamary dismissal, the postmaster replied: conic, but here is an exception to the "SIR-the revenues for this office for rule. "SIR-I was a lieutenant with the quarter ending September 30 have General Stanhope when he took Minorca been 95 cents; its expenditure, same in 1708, for which he was made a lord. I period, for tallow-candles and twine, 1.05 was a lieutenant with General Blakeney dollars. I trust my successor is instruct- when he lost Minorca in 1756, for which ed to adjust the balance." His superior he was made a lord. I am a lieutenant officer was probably as much disgusted still!" Surely such an appeal ought to with his precise correspondent as the have proved resistless, almost as resistAmerican editor who, writing to a Connecticut brother: Send full particulars of the flood"-meaning an inundation at that place received for reply: "You will find them in Genesis." A good specimen of Yankee brevity is the order received by a commissariat officer named Brown from a Colonel Boyd, which could scarcely have been couched in fewer words than : "Brown - beef - Boyd."

66

"SIR

less as that of the dying dramatist: "DEAR BOB-I have not anything to leave thee to perpetuate my memory but two helpless girls. Look upon them sometimes, and think of him that was to the last moments of his life thine.-G. FARQUHAR."

Bob Johnson the jockey, noted in turf annals by his connection with the famous mare Beeswing, was as chary of his words

LORD LYTTON ON THE AGE OF MUR

DERERS.

as his master was of his money. Having | Jones, of New Jersey, laudanum. G. Jento write to Mr. Ord to let him know how kins, of Philadelphia, third-story window." things were going on at home, Bob compressed his information into the smallest possible compass: "SIR-The meer's weel; I'm weel; we're all weel.- ROBERT JOHNSON." A pretty connubial effusion was that of the French lady: "I write to you because I have nothing to do, I end my letter because I have nothing to say.' Not so pretty the note chalked upon a tea-tray by a woman who hanged herself after a tiff with her husband: "DEAR JIM-You have driven me to do this little affair. Be good to the dog, and ask Mrs. L. to be kind to the birds."

IN Lord Lytton's last novel, he introduces some curious remarks on the age of murderers, à propos of the conjecture that Macbeth ought to be imagined as not more than twenty-eight when he murdered Duncan. It belongs to youth, he says, to begin the habit of miscalculating its own power in relation to the society in which you live and this habit unless begun in youth, is rarely begun later. But we will give the whole passage:

"Do you think Macbeth was young when he murdered Duncan ?" "Certainly. No man ever commits a first crime of violent nature, such as murder, after thirty; if he begins before, he may go on up to any age. But youth is the season for commencing those wrong calculations which belong to irrational hope and the sense of physical power. You thus read in the newspapers that the persons who murder their sweethearts are generally from two to six-and-twenty; and persons who murder from other motives than love-that is, from revenge, avarice, or ambition-are generally about twenty-eight-Iago's age. Twentyeight is the usual close of the active season for getting rid of one's fellow-creatures prize-fighter falls off after that age. I take it that Macbeth was about twenty-eight when he murdered Duncan, and from about fifty-four to sixty when he began to whine about missing the comforts of old age. But can any audience understand that difference of years in seeing a three-hours' play; or does any actor ever pretend to impress it on the audience, and appear at twenty-eight in the first act and as a sexagenarian in the fifth?"

An American paper, the organ of female rights and free-love, says in one of its issues: "On Monday, April 10, five hundred barrels of Cincinnati whiskey were landed on the levee in Louisville. On Wednesday the 12th, the Louisville Courier-Journal appeared without a line of editorial." This suggests a new argument in favour of brevity, for with a little care a man might slander folks to his heart's content with perfect impunity, for such libels by inference would scarcely be actionable. The laconic is just now in favour with transatlantic journalists, who have a knack of making fun out of very serious matters.- A circus-rider in Texas tried to turn three somersaults on horseback; the manager sent to New Orleans the following day for another somersault man. A man warned his wife in New Orleans not to light the fire with kerosene; her clothes fit his second wife remarkably well.- Few men would attempt to dry gunpowder in the kitchen stove; a man in Canada did. His afflicted family would be glad of any information as to his whereabouts.-A boy in Detroit disregarded his mother's warning not to skate on the river, as the ice was We take it that Lord Lytton never thin; his mother don't have to cook for made a greater mistake than in the abso many as she did by one.- In Massa-stract conclusion he thus formed. No chusetts, the other day, a man thought doubt it is true that passionate murders, he could cross the track in advance of murders of women by their lovers, comthe locomotive: the services at the grave were impressive.

-3

mitted in violent transports of jealousy, are usually committed young; but then Were this style of reporting to become that is not due to the miscalculation of naturalized here, the penny-a-liner's vo- individual power as regards the rest of cation would be gone. Perhaps we the world, but to absence of all calculashould be none the worse off for that; we tion-to the blinding and absorbing heat might well spare the sickening details of of a passion that turns the perpetrators "frightful accidents " and dreadful of these deeds into something like mere crimes, and who knows but suicides automatons worked for the moment by a might cease to be every-day occurrences spasm of jealousy or despair. Far from if they were chronicled thus: "John sharing Lord Lytton's view as to MacSmith, of New York, revolver. Annie beth, we feel little doubt that Shakespeare

attributed the ambitious crime of Mac-, and cold calculation of their poisoningsbeth to a much more mature age than it Lydia Sherman in America, and Mary pleased Lord Lytton to suggest. It is Anne Cotton in England - were mature impossible to suppose, if we study the women, who did not begin to think of context, that there is any considerable in- such crimes till near the age of forty, or terval of time between the murder of Dun- beyond it. The Countess de Brinvilliers can and that of Banquo. In the scene and her accomplice Gaudin de St. Croix describing the plot for the murder of Ban- were apparently both over thirty-five when quo, Macbeth speaks of Duncan's sons as they begun their career as poisoners. having just reached England and Ireland, And a German poisoner as notorious as whither they fled on the morrow of Dun-any of them, Anna Maria Zwanziger, can's murder, so that a few weeks at most whose strange series of crimes, trial, and must be supposed to have intervened. Yet it is in the scene in which Banquo's ghost appears that Lady Macbeth excuses her husband to his guests for his delirious talk, as follows:

Sit, worthy friends; my Lord is often thus,
And hath been from his youth.

a form of expression certainly not easily implying that Macbeth was still in his youth. Add to this Lady Macbeth's language in encouraging her husband to the murder, and we have additional evidence that the time of a mother's cares was to her imagination in the past:

I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me:
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless

gums

And dashed his brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this.

confession Lady Duff Gordon narrated in her "Remarkable Criminal Trials," some twenty-seven ago, was nearly fifty when she began to revel in the power which poison gave her over human life. Indeed, if Lord Lytton had had Lady Duff Gordon's volume before him, he would have seen that murders of calculation like both Macbeth's the more remarkable murders, among and that of the King in "Hamlet," it is very rare, instead of very common, to find the murderers young. Anna Maria Zwanziger,-who is sometimes called the German Brinvilliers,-confessed to the Judge that her death was fortunate for mankind, as it would have been impossible for her to discontinue her practice of poisoning, so much did she revel in the power she felt it gave her; and we suspect that Lydia Sherman and Mary Anne Cotton, and probably Catherine Wilson, the poisoner of some ten years or so back, and A young mother could hardly have spoken Christina Edmunds, the Brighton poisoner in that way. We cannot help thinking, of last year,-none of them in their youth, from both Macbeth's and Lady Macbeth's -might have said the same; indeed it is language, that Shakespeare intended to hardly possible to conceive that a very place them in the epoch, not of youthful young woman could have felt this frightpassion, but of hard ambition,-in middle ful pleasure in the wielding of an evil life. And again, would Lord Lytton have power of destruction,-if for no better attributed to Shakespeare the intention reason because other and more natural to make Hamlet's uncle, Claudius, a young hopes and pleasures would keep their atman under thirty when he contrived his traction till the season of youth had brother's death? Surely no hypothesis passed. Then take the more serious murcould be less like Shakespeare's picture.ders of deliberation. Certainly Sandt, But to leave the world of dramatic fic- the German student who murdered Kotzetion, which is important only because bue, was a lad; and Ravaillac, who murShakespeare's knowledge of men was so dered Henri IV., was only 31, a little over marvellous that what he represents is sure Lord Lytton's age; but Felton, the murto have a basis of fact beneath it, is it derer of Buckingham, seems to have been true that the more remarkable of real a mature man; Louvel, the murderer of murders, — murders committed not in the Duc de Berri in 1820, was 37; Guy sudden passion, but from ambitious or Fawkes was 35; and in our own time, other calculations, like those of Macbeth Orsini, who attempted the life of the late and Hamlet's uncle Claudius, - have Emperor of the French, was 39. been committed by the young? Certainly The ages of men who first engage in in the case of women it has almost always calculated crimes of violence range, no been otherwise, though Constance Kent doubt, lower than that of women, for the was a remarkable instance to the contrary. obvious reason that women's strongest Both the women who have attained a hor-instrument in working for even the same rible notoriety this year for the number class of ends is, while young, a different

The tick of time inside me, turning-point,
Brief, one day I felt
And slight sense there was now enough of
this, -

one, that of persuasion, and that they are | failing sense of life as the warning which only likely to have recourse to violence first precipitated him into the plot that when their chief engine fails them. But ended in the murder: in any case, Lord Lytton's analysis of the reason for the youth of murderers fails, and it is to that we wish to draw attention. It is not the experience of maturity, of the great power of the world and the little power of the individual, which deters from calculated violence, but more often, one might say, the sense of being utterly baffled which that experience engenders in a self-willed mind whereon some one desire has fastened a firm hold, that most often leads to it. It is far less "irrational

source.

hope and the sense of physical power," than rational fear and the sense of moral incapacity which precipitate men who have once fixed their desires in a particular groove into this desperate last reScott's Balfour of Burley is an admirable type of the higher kind of murderous resolve of this sort,-the kind due to a grim tenacity of purpose which cannot deny itself the satisfaction of a violent collision with all laws human or divine that seem to balk its purposes. There is an element of desperation, rather than of over-sanguine, over-youthful hope in almost every calculating murder, though, as in Macbeth's case, there may be a sense of predestination, too. Evidently neither he nor his wife believed that the witches' prophecy could fulfil itself without their own aid. The prophecy suggested to them that the murder of Duncan was the only possible path to the throne, and whetted their ambition for it; but the conviction that it would be quite impossible for the preternatural prediction to be fulfilled without their help, was akin rather to desperation, than to "irrational hope and the sense of physical power." The great calculated murders have far oftener sprung out of the savage and brutal despair of ambitious, but only too much experienced self-will, driven back upon itself, and fully conscious of its want of living resource, than out of the glowing audacity and excessive hopefulness of youth. Count Guido, in Mr. Browning's "Ring and the Book,"-a character painted not from imagination, but from history, and after a most careful study of the real pleadings of a real trial, is a perfect type of murderers on cal culation; and Count Guido is middleaged, nearly fifty, and his crime is essentially the crime of middle age, the crime not of flowing but of ebbing life, of resource failing and hate growing at the expense of life. He himself speaks of his

That I was near my seventh climacteric
Hard upon, if not over, the middle of life.

And how does the poet describe his
murderous temper? In words carefully
chosen to express most eloquently not
fullness, but starvation of soul; not irra-
tional hope and the sense of physical
sort of spiritual death:
power, but the very destructiveness of a

And thus I see him slowly and surely edged
Off all the table-land whence life upsprings
Aspiring to be immortality,
As the snake hatched on hill-top by mischance,
Despite his wriggling, slips, slides, slidders

down

Hill-side, lies low and prostrate on the smooth
Level of the outer place, lapsed in the vale:
So I lose Guido in the loneliness,
Silence and dusk, till at the doleful end,
At the horizontal line, creation's verge
From what just is to absolute nothingness,
Lo! what is this he meets, strains onward still?
What other man deep further in the fate,
To flatter him and promise fellowship,
Who, turning at the prize of a footfall,
Discovers in the act a frightful face,-
Judas made monstrous by much solitude!...
There let them grapple, denizens o' the dark,
Foes or friends, but indissolubly bound,
In their one spot out of the ken of God
Or care of man, for ever and ever more!
That surely is a much truer picture of the
typical murderer than any other which
modern poetry has given us.
picture which, contrary to Lord Lytton's
theory, makes such murder to spring out
of the selfish and wilful desperateness
which can hardly come till middle-age
even to the worst man, and which has no
part or share in the sanguine temper and
hopeful audacity of youth.

And it is a

ed to the authority of the King, but had been left as a city apart, following its own customs and virtually governed by its own laws, while Florence engrossed the national attention, there would have always been a non-Italian spot in the midst of Italy. Being fixed at Rome, the Legislature has had no option but to resolve that in coming there it shall be found to have brought Italy with it.

smoothly with Italy lately that we con- | curses, and gradually to establish in the ceal from ourselves how many embarrass-minds of friends and foes the fact that ments the occupation might have entailed. Rome is now a part of Italy, that Italian Italy is the luckiest of nations. It has law must prevail there, and that when the thriven by the blunders and misfortunes interests of Italy at Rome and the interof others, as well as by its own audacity ests of the religious body or hierarchy and good sense. If a danger threatens conflict, the former are to prevail. it, something is sure to happen, which no Whether the decision to make Rome the one could have expected, to save it. The capital of Italy was wise or not, whether Pope never lets his quarrel sleep for an the physical evils of the place and neighinstant, and the Pope might have made bourhood can be surmounted, and whether himself very unpleasant to Italy if he the population of Rome is suited to form had but had any external support. But the material in which the centre of Govwhile Germany kept down France and ernment resides, are questions which canAustria so as to make them unable, if not properly be answered for years to they had really been willing, to befriend come. But there can be no doubt that the Pope, the policy of the Pope sudden- Italy has derived one immediate advantly took the form of extreme hostility to age from the transfer of the capital to Germany. As Prince Bismarck lately Rome. There has been no choice but to said, it formed no part of the Imperial fight boldly with the pretensions of the plan that Germany should become the Papacy, and to carry out the doctrines of ally of Italy against the Papacy. Italy modern Italian policy to their legitimate had not been disposed to court the favour conclusions. If Rome had been subjectof Germany during the war. The King was desirous of sending his troops to aid the French, and although his Ministers had sense enough to stop the perpetration of so fatal a blunder, they did not, or could not, prevent Garibaldi from going to kill as many Germans as he could lay hands on, in the name of the Universal Republic. The new German Empire cared for nothing except to consolidate its unity; and Prussia had for years been Italy has been for centuries the home on the best terms with Rome, and had of ecclesiasticism in all its forms, and remade every possible concession so as to ligious bodies of many kinds have nestled avoid any opposition on the part of its and flourished there. The statesmen of Catholic provinces to the central Govern- modern Italy had at an early date after ment. Prince Bismarck did not want to the establishment of the Kingdom to have the Rhine provinces stirred to dis- consider how they would deal with these affection, intrigues revived in Polish dis- religious bodies, and they gradually tricts, and religious differences set blaz- worked out three propositions. The first ing to scare Southern from Northern was that the buildings destined for the Germany. If the Pope had been willing, use of such bodies must be held to be as he might have had very good friends and much liable to be expropriated and approtectors at Berlin; and although force plied to purposes of public utility as any of arms would not probably have been used other buildings. The second was that reto turn the Italians out of Rome, yet the ligious bodies must not be allowed to Pope in all the disputes which the occupa- hold land, as the resources of the country tion of Rome has excited would have had a were wasted, and the population encourbacking which the Italians could not have aged to live under subjection to masters afforded to disregard. Most fortunately possessed by a spirit alien to that of modfor Italy the Pope chose to quarrel with ern society. The third was that religious Germany, and the Ultramontane party set bodies must, in order to be allowed to exitself to revenge 1870 by the disruption ist at all, have some recognizable charof German unity. The consequence has acter of practical utility. They must not been that Italy has not been hampered be merely collections of persons retiring in dealing with the Pope by any external difficulties. It has been at liberty to take its own course, and its course has been to treat the Pope respectfully and kindly, to care little for abuse and calumny and

from the world to lead a saintly life. When the Italians got hold of Rome, they naturally found a very vast field for the application of these principles. Rome is ill built, ill drained, very dirty, and very