1832.] Affairs in General. 101 



creates a sort of school, and may boast of his disciples in infamy. 

 The public assists this disposition on the part of the criminals, by in- 

 venting cases of guilt before they are committed. Burkings, if \ve are 

 to judge by report, have been for the last six weeks as plenty as black- 

 berries. Every lady of fifty-five within the bills of mortality has a 

 -peculiar case of burking to her own share, which she " knows to be a 

 fact" at least ten times a day, and which she repeats with an emphasis, 

 that intimates she not only fears it to be false, but wishes it to be true. 

 This morbid and miserable appetite for horrors confines hundreds to 

 their firesides, nursing their imagination to keep it warm, until some 

 stray visitor happens to drop in, to sup off the horrors that are so hos- 

 pitably served up. On other minds it acts in another way ; by sug- 

 gesting the purchase of an inch or two of the rope with which any 

 conspicuous culprit is hanged; by leading men and boys as practised 

 in the theory of crime as men nay, even women, to the scene of blood, 

 to cut, by way of " remembrance," a twig from the hedge where the 

 knife that murdered Weare was found ; to chop off a, fragment of the 

 Red Barn, to be turned into toothpicks, tobacco-stoppers, and toys for 

 the amusement of infancy ; or to rush to the well in Nova Scotia Gar- 

 dens, as if it were some new and anti-cholera chalybeate, to drink, we 

 are told, (at the cost of three-pence,) a glass of the water in which 

 Bishop stifled his victims. This is the climax of the disgusting and the 

 despicable; and the water-drinkers far transcend in degradation the 

 lovers of rum, that were said to have emptied the vesselin which the 

 remains of Nelson were preserved ; or the admirers of poetry, who con- 

 tended so earnestly for a phial-full of the spirit in which Byron was 

 brought to England. But they all belong to the same class, and one 

 species of diseased curiosity leads to another. We once saw a ludicrous 

 example of the feeling on board a steam-boat. An accident had hap- 

 pened to some part of the machinery that caused momentary danger, but 

 it ended simply in a few splinters of wood being scattered about. From 

 these, one of the passengers picked out the largest and most picturesque 

 he could find; and with this rare memento under his arm, he strutted 

 up and down the vessel for several hours, evidently not knowing what 

 to do with it, and balancing his delight with his inconvenience in the 

 most grotesque style imaginable. This at first sight appears as harm- 

 less as it is stupid ; but the same collector of curiosities would no 

 doubt have given one of his hands, and the whole contents of his mu- 

 seum, for the piece of Thurtell's skin, that some experimentalize!' took 

 the trouble to have tanned. 



FASTING IN HIGH LIFE. It appears to us that, notwithstanding the 

 .ten thousand eventful topics of the month, the speechmakers must be 

 deplorably at a loss for subjects to debate about, and the world itself 

 more than ever in want of something to do, when meetings are called to 

 petition the bench of Bishops for a General Fast. A prayer to this 

 effect has been preferred to the Archbishop of Canterbury by the inha- 

 bitants of Camberwell ; and we are the more surprised at the fast-fever 

 breaking out in such a quarter, because Camberwell has been for a cen- 

 tury past the retreat of every common-councilman that can, by any con- 

 trivance or extortion, indulge in the luxury of what is called a country- 

 house. We could not therefore have anticipated such a petition from 

 them ; but even if the whole court of aldermen should, by some subver- 



