touch of insanity to all her descendants. She had married a Frenchman of rank, much older than herself, whom she hated, and soon abandoned, taking refuge under a false name in the State of New York, where the laws, according to our author, permit married women to leave their husbands, and allow them the separate management of their property. And this wild and improbable tale, of the conviction of a mad woman for the murder of a person still alive, for arson committed on a dwelling-house which was accidentally fired, and for stealing gold which was actually stolen by the chief witness for the prosecution, of her conviction under evidence which would hardly have authorized a justice of the peace to commit her for trial, is Mr. Cooper's ground for impugning the fairness of our courts of law, and for affirming that the institution of trial by jury" is totally unsuited to a democracy!" There may be defects and evils in the administration of criminal justice in our country, but this, certainly, is not the way to expose or amend them.

Our author is most unhappy in selecting a ground of complaint against the action of juries in America. No one can justly accuse them of undue severity. Their tendency, it is notorious, especially in capital cases, is to acquit, when both the law and the evidence require a conviction. From a natural unwillingness to have any share in taking away human life, from increased doubts as to the equity and expediency of capital punishment, and from involuntary sympathy with a person pleading for his life when the whole force of the government seems to be arrayed against him and striving to produce a conviction, the jury often seem disposed to take the bit in their teeth, and to carry off the accused in triumph, in spite of the testimony. They usurp the prerogative of the pardoning power, and often say "not guilty," when they mean only that the criminal ought "not to be punished." In order to save their consciences and their oaths, we have often wished that the Scotch practice might be introduced into the English common law, so that the jury might be allowed to return a verdict of "not proven," when the evidence did not absolutely compel them to say either "guilty" or "not guilty." At present, the "reasonable doubt," of which they are told the prisoner must have the benefit, is often made to cover most unreasonable and illegal scruples. The case of the Boorns, who

were tried and convicted in Vermont, over thirty years ago, for the murder of their brother-in-law, who subsequently made his appearance alive, is about the only one which we can recollect that affords even a coloring of probability to Mr. Cooper's extravagant fiction; and in that instance, the court and the jury could plead in justification of their blunder, that they had relied mainly on the confessions which the accused, from some inexplicable motives, were induced to make..

There is no pressing necessity to answer our author's arguments, or to defend an institution so ancient and so much honored as the trial by jury. We admit there is some force in his remark, that in a monarchy, where the jury stand between the sovereign and the people for the protection of the latter, such a tribunal is more useful and more likely to be just than it is in a democracy, where the people themselves are the sovereign power. And yet this distinction is not so important as it seems; for the unity of "the people," even in the wildest democracy that ever existed, is only fictitious, a mere figure of speech. In our own country, a jury commonly represents the opinion of the disinterested and unimpassioned multitude sitting in judgment upon the contending claims of individuals. It is true, that the judges and the prosecuting officer represent the sovereign power in the state, and that the jury also form a portion of the same sovereign power; but we must recollect that this sovereign is not one, but many, and therefore does not sit as a judge in its own cause. Its unity is fictitious; its multiplicity is real. The jurymen in this country are usually no more biased in favor of the government, because it is a government of the people, than they are in favor of the accused, who also is one of the people, one of themselves. Nay, because the government is in a great degree a unit, while the people are many, and though they elect the government, they are still ruled and repressed by it during its term of office, the sympathies of the jury are more likely to be with the accused than with the accuser. It is only in very few cases that the excitement against a supposed criminal becomes so universal and overwhelming, as to rob him of the chance of a fair trial. And the law is very watchful to guard against even this infrequent danger of rooted prejudice or personal dislike. The care with which a jury is selected, not by any means on the principle of universal suffrage, but by putting

the names only of respectable householders into the box; the searching questions that may be put by the counsel on both sides to every one who is drawn by lot, before he is allowed to try a particular cause; and the separation of the jurymen, for the most part, from popular influences during the time of the trial, together with the solemnity of the oath that is administered to them, and of the charge which they receive from the bench, are very efficient safeguards against prepossession and malice. We respect, we honor, the judges, who have kept the ermine of office quite as unsullied in this country as in Great Britain. If they were appointed, as before, quamdiu se bene gesserint, we should be quite willing to place the issue of every trial in their hands, after the common fashion in a court of admiralty. But the independence of the judiciary among us, of late, has been seriously impaired in several States, by causing the judges to be elected by popular vote, and to hold office only for a short term of years. It would be very perilous, under such circumstances, to give them the whole power and responsibility, instead of allowing them to share it, in each case, with a small number of persons chosen by lot from the community at large, and representing not only the authority, but the average intelligence and the sense of justice, of the whole people. It will require much weightier arguments than any which Mr. Cooper has adduced to shake our confidence in an arrangement which seems equally deserving of respect for its antiquity and its adaptation to the wants of the present age.

ART. VI. The Scarlet Letter, a Romance. By NATHANIEL HAWTHorne. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields. 1850. 12mo. pp. 322.

THAT there is something not unpleasing to us in the misfortunes of our best friends, is a maxim we have always spurned, as a libel on human nature. But we must be allowed, in behalf of Mr. Hawthorne's friend and gossip, the literary public, to rejoice in the event -a "removal" from the office of Surveyor of the Customs for the port of Salem,

which has brought him back to our admiring, and, we modestly hope, congenial society, from associations and environments which have confessedly been detrimental to his genius, and to those qualities of heart, which, by an unconscious revelation through his style, like the involuntary betrayal of character in a man's face and manners, have won the affection of other than personal friends. We are truly grieved at the savage "scratches our phoenix has received from the claws of the national eagle, scratches gratuitous and unprovoked, whereby his plumage remains not a little ruffled, if his breast be not very deeply lacerated. We hope we do not see tendencies to self immolation in the introductory chapter to this volume. It seems suicidal to a most enviable fame, to show the fine countenance of the sometime denizen of Concord Parsonage, once so serene and full of thought, and at the same time so attractively arch, now cloudy and peevish, or dressed in sardonic smiles, which would scare away the enthusiasm of less hearty admirers than those he "holds by the button." The pinnacle on which the "conscience of the beautiful" has placed our author's graceful image is high enough, however, to make slight changes from the wear and tear of out-door elements, highway dust, and political vandalism, little noticed by those accustomed to look lovingly up to it. Yet they cannot be expected to regret a "removal," which has saved those finer and more delicate traits, in which genius peculiarly manifests itself, from being worn away by rough contact, or obliterated by imperceptible degrees through the influence of the atmosphere.

Mr. Hawthorne's serious apprehensions on this subject are thus candidly expressed :

as it would never

"I began to grow melancholy and restless; continually prying into my mind, to discover which of its poor properties were gone, and what degree of detriment had already accrued to the remainder. I endeavored to calculate how much longer I could stay in the Custom House, and yet go forth a man. To confess the truth, it was my greatest apprehension, be a measure of policy to turn out so quiet an individual as myself, and it being hardly in the nature of a public officer to resign, it was my chief trouble, therefore, that I was likely to grow gray and decrepit in the Surveyorship, and become much such another animal as the old Inspector. Might it not, in the tedious lapse of official life that lay before me, finally be with me

as it was with this venerable friend, -to make the dinner hour the nucleus of the day, and to spend the rest of it, as an old dog spends it, asleep in the sunshine or the shade? A dreary lookforward this, for a man who felt it to be the best definition of happiness to live throughout the whole range of his faculties and sensibilities! But, all this while, I was giving myself very unnecessary alarm. Providence had meditated better things for me than I could possibly imagine for myself."

A man who has so rare an individuality to lose may well shudder at the idea of becoming a soulless machine, a sort of official scarecrow, having only so much of manly semblance left as will suffice to warn plunderers from the property of "Uncle Sam." Haunted by the horror of mental annihilation, it is not wonderful that he should look askance at the drowsy row of officials, as they reclined uneasily in tilted chairs, and should measure their mental torpidity by the length of time they had been subjected to the soul-exhaling process in which he had not yet got beyond the conscious stage. It was in pure apprehension, let us charitably hope, and not in a satirical, and far less a malicious, mood, that he describes one of them as retaining barely enough of the moral and spiritual nature to keep him from going upon all fours, and possessing neither soul, heart, nor mind more worthy of immortality than the spirit of the beast, which "goeth downward." Judging his aged colleagues thus, well might the young publican, as yet spiritually alive, stand aghast! A man may be excusable for starving his intellect, if Providence has thrown him into a situation where its dainty palate cannot be gratified. But for the well being of his moral nature, he is more strictly responsible, and has no right, under any circumstances, to remain in a position where, from causes beyond his control, his conscience is deprived of its supremacy over the will, and policy or expediency, whether public or selfish, placed upon its throne. "Most men," says our honest author, "suffer moral detriment from this mode of life," from causes which, (having just devoted four pages to a full-length caricature,) he had not space to hint at, except in the following pithy admonition to the aspirants after a place in the Blue Book.

"Uncle Sam's gold - meaning no disrespect to the worthy old gentleman-has, in this respect, a quality of enchantment, like that of the Devil's wages. Whoever touches it should look well