The French Poets and Novelists. 617 



band revenges his wrongs, and that every lover kills himself in despair 1 ? 

 Are English women always pure? is vengeance unknown in Britain? 

 and is suicide merely a name amongst our immaculate countrymen? 

 No we never take up a paper without reading a case of mm. con.; 

 we see, alas! too often, terrible instances of the most deadly ven- 

 geance ; and occurrences of suicide have lately been so frequent in 

 England, that the very police-magistrates have assumed to them- 

 selves the right of punishing those who are detected and saved in an 

 attempt at self-destruction. Yet the author of the article we are 

 examining adduces a long list of cases where individuals in France 

 have committed suicide on account of remorse, disappointed love, or 

 even a trivial stroke of adversity, to prove that the immorality of the 

 French is not confined to a few depraved beings, but that it is par- 

 taken of and shared amongst thirty-four millions of souls, without a 

 single exception, they being all one family in vice. 



Perhaps the critic, whose deplorable misrepresentations we have 

 taken some pains to correct, is not aware that the average amount of 

 crime in England preponderates slightly over that in France; and that 

 there are more murders, more robberies, more infanticides, and more 

 unnatural crimes registered in the annals of turpitude and delin- 

 quency in the former than there are in the latter country. An appeal 

 to the " Newgate Calendar," and to a collection of the " Gazette des 

 Tribunaux," will bear us out in our assertion. 



The abuser of French novels now proceeds to favour us with some 

 extracts from the said " Gazette des Tribunaux," relative to several 

 horrible trials that have lately taken place in France. Amongst the 

 hundreds that occur annually in that as well as in any other country, 

 it is very easy to select half a dozen of the most dreadful, "in order 

 to prove that the principles which pervade the novels appear to ex- 

 hibit themselves elsewhere." In answer to this we declare that the 

 same principles exhibit themselves also in England; particularly 

 when Mrs. Brownrigg flogged her apprentices to death, and when 

 Cooke at Leicester, about five years ago, murdered Mr. Paas with a 

 log of wood, and then burnt the body piecemeal on the fire to get rid of 

 all traces that might lead to his discovery. The late murder of Mrs. 

 Brown by Greenacre was not attended with any dreadful circum- 

 stances, we suppose. Oh ! no in England murders are always com- 

 mitted mercifully and humanely, according to the inferences we natu- 

 rally draw from the remarks of the critic in the " Quarterly ;" whereas 

 in France they are invariably attended with unusual circumstances 

 of horror. To support this assertion he adduces the case of Dellacol- 

 longe, "who cut the body into pieces for the purpose of more easily 

 disposing of it in ponds and ditches." Our worthy critic forgets the 

 almost parallel conduct (above-mentioned) of Cooke, who cut the body 

 into pieces to burn it ; nor could he possibly foresee the monstrous 

 deeds of Greenacre. 



The verdict in Dellacollonge's case was as follows : " As to the 

 murder, the culprit is guilty of voluntary homicide, but without pre- 

 meditation; and as to the robbery, he is guilty, but with extenuating 

 circumstances." 



Upon which the writer in the " Quarterly" says, " Without preme- 



