Then again she looks up a little, and appears as one whose form, Like her own oak, ne'er trembled in the storm.'-p. 89. The reader will easily perceive that these and similar passages are shrouded in oracular darkness. In our wish to reconcile them, we had recourse, as usual, to the notes, where we found, in reference to this part of the subject, two quotations from Exodus, the first of which, as being most to the point, it will perhaps be sufficient togive. And the blood shall be to you for a token upon the houses where you are, and when I see the blood I will pass over you, and the plague shall not be upon you to destroy you when I smite the land of Egypt.'Exodus, c. xii. 8. 13. This exposition was not, at first sight, very promising; but by a careful collation of the note with the text, we are enabled to state with some confidence, that the author's meaning must be this, that as the destroying angel spared the houses that were marked with blood; so shall he spare England, because she is not marked with blood. This explanation is in the best style of the ancient soothsayers: but lest there should be readers so uncandid as not to admit its applicability to the noble lord's topic, we shall state the elucidation which the argument affords, of these different passages, 'I turn to the ocean,-England-the feelings of joy occasioned by the recollection of our native country, and the pride with which we contemplate her present gallant struggle in the cause of Europe, PERHAPS a little damped by reflecting upon the scenes of misery which inevitably accompany war, wherever it is found, as well as upon the severe and irretrievable loss of valuable lives she has herself sustained in its prosecution.' The noble lord thinks the war perhaps glorious, and we infer that he thinks it perhaps necessary; but it is perhaps a natural damper of the feelings which such a war should excite, to recollect that war in the abstract is attended with some human misery. This reasoning, which is perfectly clear and irrefragable, leads his lordship to a conclusion which approaches very nearly to the declared opinion of his noble relatives, that as war, wherever it is to be found, is attended with local evil, it would be prudent, instead of carrying it abroad, to permit it to come amongst us at home. It is but justice to observe that the author is not less bappy in his profane than in his scriptural references. We never met with a more surprising instance of illustration by an apt classical allusion, than the following. Nor rouse to save tho' ruin sap the wall.'-p. 58. This is the text; the note follows. tanti tibi non sit opaci Omnis arena Tagi, quodque in mare volvitur aurum -p. 106. It is a scourge which ought by no means to be inflicted by us upon the French on any part of the continent of Europe; but it may very properly be visited (as surgeons try experiments, 'in corpore vili') on the Turks, Egyptians, or South Americans: when directed against Ciudad Rodrigo or Badajos, it is a miserable waste of strength; but when waged upon Alexandria or Buenos Ayres, it is good husbandry and statesman-like resolution, The last four lines of the poem, in which he dissuades England from toiling for fame or glory; and in which, because she is stout and able, he exhorts her by no means to fight; till she is forced to fight for her life, are of so high a strain of public spirit as well as poetry, that we cannot refrain from quoting them. 'Let others toil for fame, thy veteran ray Beams yet undimmed, nor knows, nor fears decay, Fight England but for life, and live but to be free!'--p. 92. We must here, admonished by our contracting limits, conclude our review of this excellent work. We can only hope that what we have said will not damp the curiosity of the reader, nor induce him to take our opinion upon a poem, which we promise him he will find, upon one or two perusals, (we recommend two at least,) to exceed any idea that we have been able to convey of it. ART. IX. Observations on the Criminal Law of England, as it relates to Capital Punishments, and on the Mode in which it is administered. By Sir Samuel Romilly. London. THIS able and luminous pamphlet, which was published two years ago, was intended to convey to the public the substance of a speech delivered by the author in the House of Commons, (9th February, 1810,) on moving for leave to bring in a series of bills to repeal the acts of 10 and 11 William III. 12 Anne, and 24 Geo. II. which make the crimes of privately stealing in a shop, goods of the value of five shillings; or in a dwelling house, or on board a vessel in a navigable river, property of the value of forty shillings, capital felonies.' The publication took place while the fate of the bills was still depending in parliament. On the 2d of May, the motion for a repeal of the capital punishment for the larceny in a dwelling-house was rejected by a small majority. Soon after, the second bill, relating to larceny in a shop, was carried in the House of Commons without a division; but its progress was stopped in the House of Lords by a majority of three to one. At the end of the same session, the third bill, from the pressure of business, was. given up without having come to a final hearing. The legislative question having been thus disposed of, for a time, the pamphlet itself remains as a memorial of the author's views and reasonings upon one branch of the criminal law of our land. An argument which submits to competent authority, does not immediately forfeit, as a matter of course, all esteem either with the author of it, or with many of his reflecting readers, who, although they delegate their public voice, reserve their judgment to themselves. In the present instance, if the learned author still holds the same unshaken confidence in the justness of his principles, he probably will not consent to abandon, on the first failure, this attempt to humanize the laws of his country in the few cases where they appear to have departed from their usual spirit of a judicious and temperate severity. But were all expectation gone, of seeing his proposed improvement carried into effect, we should only be the more inclined to bear our humble testimony to the principle of it, and pay a few literary obsequies to a fallen speculation. By the law as it now stands, the offences which we have already described are punishable with death. But the statutes which enjoin that punishment are not put in execution, except in a very few rare examples. From the records of the criminal courts, (Observ. p. 11,) we find that, in a period of seven years, from 1802 to 1809, inclusive, out of 508 persons, capitally convicted in London and Middlesex, 67 suffered the sentence of the law; these convictions including, it must be observed, every species of capital offence. By other tables of information it appears that, within the same period, there were committed to Newgate for trial, charged with the crime of stealing in dwelling-houses, 1013 persons; of shoplifting 859. The number of capital convictions obtained upon these charges is not easy to be ascertained: but of the persons so charged, one only was executed. Such are some of the phenomena of the criminal courts at a recent time; and from them it is plain that the letter of the penal law, and the administration of it, as to the statutes already cited, are as widely at variance with each other as life and death can be. The documents that have been published are not so complete as could be wished in some other points, but particularly in that which respects the comparison of the actual convictions under each statute, with the instances in which the penalty has been enforced. But by arguing from the two general statements which we have just now given, and assuming, as a probable conjecture, that some proportion between a fourth and an eighth of the 1872 charged with those larcenies may have been found guilty of the capital part, the result will be that the law should seem to hold its course of rigour, without any violent inequality, against the more atrocious atrocious crimes, while the sentence of it is so rarely enforced upon the offences of capital theft, that usage has, in fact, anticipated that repeal of the statutes in question which it has been proposed to the legislature to enact. No one blames this laxity in the administration of laws of unmeasured and revolting rigour. It brings them more nearly to the point where they ought to be. It vindicates the national character; upholds the distinction between cruelty and justice; and puts the means of redress on better conditions to the community. Those tribunals which have thought to keep order by a ferocious system of vindictive justice, have forgotten that such a system maintained in vigour must do away the dutiful respect and confidence which human beings ought to feel towards the laws under which they live; that it must alienate the humane and moderate, who most deserve to be protected, and harden the minds of a rougher cast by the spectacle of sanguinary or frequent executions. When life is made a cheap and vulgar thing by the laws themselves, to what principle of human nature can they apply for an effectual sanction? It may be right to remind men who are for making thorough work in the business of legislation, that it is better that some evils should be endured than that others should be done. All punishment is a sore and painful evil, not more to the offender than to the state which inflicts it. Not only, therefore, does it become a duty in the state to take care that the least measure of punishment that is sufficient, be inflicted, but sometimes to forego a remedy, which would put the common sense of humanity and justice to too severe a trial. Laws cannot do every thing we might wish, and we do wrong in acting as if we thought they could when strained to it. As they are human contrivances, partial inefficiency cannot be a heavy reproach to them; but as they are made by man against man, extreme severity must be so. Let it be granted that the first duty of the legislature is to give the citizen protection in his rights and property. Unquestionable, however, as this duty is, the performance of it must be attempted with those abatements and qualifications of prudence, which will give a more beneficial enjoyment of the object, than a keen, morose, and peremptory pursuit of it at all hazards. By no severity, inflicted as well as denounced, could crimes ever be wholly extirpated. Beyond a certain point, therefore, there may be an increase of severity that is a useless excess, and gains nothing but odium and obstruction to the course of justice. The true aim of legal rigour must be to make a compromise with things which it cannot subdue, and abate the prevalence of fraud and outrage so far as to render life tolerably secure. On this moderated scheme, which agrees best with the imperfection of the world in its means of power, and its destiny of happiness, law may begin to econo VOL. VII. NO. XIII. L mize mize in the evils which it is compelled to employ, and abate something of the sternness of its retaliations and inflictions. Whether the three particular statutes we have to consider were ever meant to be literally executed has been made a doubt. That they are not executed, is the fact; and that they ought not, is on all hands admitted. They who are anxious for reform, think the result of the practice is right in the main, but desire to see the sanguinary statutes abolished, and other provisions introduced in their place more congenial to the spirit and opinions of the age, and more consistent with the actual administration of justice. Their request does not seem very unreasonable. They desire to have justice done according to the laws rather than in spite of them. That lenity, which the sense and usage of the times have substituted for a regular execution of the law, is a benefit upon the whole, but obtained at the price of many and great inconveniences. For, first of all, in how many instances do the parties themselves, who have been sufferers, decline to prosecute, or to urge the prosecution, deterred by the inordinate hardship of the fate to which they may by possibility bring the culprit? The loss of property is a wrong which men do not bear with very remarkable patience; but neither the goading sense of that wrong, nor obedience to public duty, will be strong enough to carry men through the anxieties of a capital prosecution, unless they are rather more vindictive than they ought to be, or hardier patriots than can be expected. Whereas it has been said that sanguinary penalties rarely enforced, can inspire no terror; we conceive this to be a mistake. They do often inspire a very effectual terror into the person who is injured; though it may be doubted how far he is exactly the proper object of legal intimidation. Seldom as it is put in force, the very name and apprehension of the sentence of death is a detriment to the cause of justice with him, however weak it may be as a check to the violation of it with the offender. In this way, severe statutes become often a charter of impunity to the crimes which they were intended to punish. Suppose, however, that a prosecutor is found, whether honest or vindictive; that a man who has lost a piece of cotton from his shop, or a few silver spoons from his closet, undertakes, with great labour and expense to himself, to push the offender to the peril of his life; we are only one step in advance. Few are so little acquainted with the proceedings in a court as not to know that the evidence brought there is way-laid with the same scruples which impede the first movements of the prosecution; that witnesses do not unfrequently appear to disguise and withhold the truth, the whole of which they are sworn to speak, from the dread of swearing away,' how innocently soever, a man's life, for a matter of five shillings, |