438 Notes of the Month on [APRIL, 



nation yearly for the support of the royal establishment are expended 

 for that purpose, well and good. But if the money have taken another 

 direction, we have every right to inquire why it should have been 

 alienated from the course which is equally conducive to the king's state 

 and the national honour. No subject can be fitter for public exami- 

 nation. 



The taste for hanging one's self appears to make progress, and within 

 the last three months the cord has superseded all the other favourite and 

 fashionable ways of getting out of the world ; the few exceptions 

 which have occurred lying chiefly among the ladies' waiting-maids, who 

 have adopted the ennui with the cast-off petticoats of their mistresses ; 

 the sempstresses, who have grown romantic on the contents of the cir- 

 culating library ; and the boarding-school young ladies, who, after hav- 

 ing undergone their four years' courses of the piano, Italian, French, 

 quadrilling, and acrostics in the Annuals, think it cruel that such accom- 

 plishments must revert to the paternal cheesemonger's counter, or be 

 lost to fame, dead, and buried in a back parlour in Billiter-lane A 

 class who generally prefer opium or arsenic ; and who in all instances, 

 strange as it may appear, contrive to procure both with the most perfect 

 facility, notwithstanding the precautions of the venders. We by no 

 means speak of those matters in jest, for nothing can call more directly 

 for the interference of authority, than the frequent instances of crime in 

 both parties, in the scandalous readiness of the chemist to give the 

 poison for its paltry gain, and the fatal readiness of the infatuated pur- 

 chasers to use it. But there are obvious means enough of terrifying those 

 whom death cannot terrify ; and we are perfectly satisfied that if the 

 law should declare that the bodies of all suicides were to be given up 

 to Surgeons' Hall for dissection ; and the juries on inquests should be 

 strongly impressed with the public injury and personal crime of giving 

 false verdicts, and bringing in, " died of insanity/' while it was as clear 

 as day that the cause was passion and perverseness, we should not hear 

 of one suicide for every fifty we now hear of. If we are to be told that 

 the feelings of families and friends would be hurt by this consignment 

 of the suicide's body, we answer truly, that it would be the interest 

 of all families and friends to have the terrors of suicide as striking as 

 possible, for the obvious reason, that the more formidable they are, the 

 more likely are the moping and melancholy among their children or 

 friends to be preserved in life. Let the law sanction any measure which 

 will make the sense and certainty of shame stronger than the fear of 

 death, and there will be no more suicides. It is a well-known fact of 

 Roman history, that at a period when, from some affectation of Greek 

 heroism, or other similar folly, many women of rank put an end to their 

 existence, the crime was instantly stopped by a law declaring that in 

 future all suicides should be exposed to the public eye in the Forum. 

 From that moment no lady was heroic, self-murder ceased to be fashion- 

 able; and in all probability there was not a single exposure in the 

 Forum. 



The frequency of this crime has been the proverbial scandal of Eng- 

 land, though it occurs to a much more considerable extent in France 

 and in Germany. But wherever it occurs with such frequency, it has the 

 direct consequence of hardening the popular heart. In Paris, the 

 Morgue, or place where the unowned suicides, the chief part of whom 



