-." ij '< 



___ 



THE FRENCH CONVULS1VES. 199 



He purchases the body of the deceased for three hundred francs, in 

 spite of a gentle request from the executioner's daughter, who be- 

 sought her father, with a most sweet smile, to grant her the fine 

 black hair of the convict to make a tower. He superintends the 

 burial with care and tenderness, but the next day, when he visits the 

 tomb, he finds that it had been robbed for the school of medicine, 

 while the women of the neighbourhood had appropriated the grave 

 clothes to their own use. " I then found," he says, " that had it been 

 otherwise, her miserable destiny had not been entirely accomplished !" 

 Chariot had long before been devoured by dogs at the Barriere du 

 Combat. 



Such is Mr. Janin's first sally into the regions of the terrible in 

 fiction. That the production is gloomy, exaggerated, and sometimes 

 disgusting in its details, breathing of shocking realities, as well as 

 trenching too closely on the confines of decency, it is useless to deny ; 

 that it has, with all its faults, an air of vraisemblance, a positive 

 identity with what is actually passing in the world around us, it 

 would be impossible to controvert. 







- 



. 



BREAKING COVER. 



9VJ3C 



AMONG the various mortifying disqualifications under which the 

 Irish Catholics laboured, previously to the passing of the Emancipa- 

 tion Bill, the Disarming Act, prohibiting them from having in their 

 possession any offensive or defensive weapons, appears to have been 

 not the least galling to our Hibernian fellow-subjects ; inasmuch as 

 it debarred them in many instances, in cases of real or supposed ag- 

 grievance, from that dernier resort, which the natives of the " Emerald 

 Isle" have preferred, from time immemorial, to the more dilatory as 

 well as uncertain redress offered by a court of law. An ungenerous 

 or timid adversary, especially if a member of the government church 

 might (as has been more than once the case) evade a hostile meeting 

 with a Papist, on the ground of the above-mentioned disqualification. 



A circumstance of this kind occurred in Mallow, county Cork, 

 about the latter end of the last century; when the appellant devised 

 a whimsical and ingenious experiment to evade the law, and put 

 himself on a level with his over-scrupulous antagonist. Mr. Flynn, 

 a respectable Catholic hatter, was, or supposed himself, grievously 

 insulted by Mr. Patrick Doolittle, a tailor, of the Established Church, 

 residing in the same town. Having in vain endeavoured to obtain 

 satisfaction, (in the national and current sense of the word,) and 

 being given, moreover, to understand that the orthodox tailor mag- 

 nanimously declined giving him the meeting, for no other reason 

 than, lest by so doing he should be the proximate cause of subjecting 

 Flynn to the penalties in such case made and provided, the spirited 



