MEMOIRS OF PERSONS LATELY DECEASED. MRS. E. WEddell. Died, on Tuesday, the 12th of July, aged 82, at her house in Upper Brook Street, Mrs. Elizabeth Weddell, eldest daughter of the late Sir John Ramsden, of Byram, and widow of William Weddell, Esq. of Newby Park, Yorkshire. These words, which will touch the hearts of all who knew her, may well suggest even to those who have only heard of her, that some notice beyond a bare record of the event must be due to the memory of one, whose like we shall not look upon again. Perhaps her most obvious and striking characteristic was a warmth, an expansion of heart peculiar to herself, an unbounded benevolence and kindness overflowing towards all her fellow-creatures. To" deliver the poor that cried," to relieve every distress within her reach as judiciously as bountifully, made but a small part of the charity she felt and practised. Hers was truly that recommended by St. Paul, 1 Cor. xiii. Did some good fortune befal a deserving stranger, (much more an acquaintance,) she was overjoyed as if the prosperity were her own; and proportionably grieved and dejected at the news of a calamity or a sorrow. Only then there burst forth-" Can any thing be done to serve or comfort the sufferers? Could my house, my purse, my endeavours avail ?"-Nor let such a disposition be placed to the account of mere constitutional good-nature: it was inseparably linked with the sincerest, the most fervent piety. Both seemed instinctive and innate. She seemed born without the seeds of pride, selfishness, covetousness, angry and malevolent passions, and she could not imagine them to exist in others. When expressing abhorrence of wickedness in the abstract, she would use terms that sounded severe; but tell her that an individual had committed a villanous action or formed a base design, had been dishonest, ungrateful, perfidious, &c. and her first impulse was to disbelieve the fact and pronounce it impossible. On the other hand, she took for granted that the uprightness, benignity, and generosity of her own bosom, were qualities pretty nearly common to all mankind; and, if questioned, would say with earnestness, "Nay, but you know people must act (or think or feel) so and so; how can they do otherwise?" And yet this simplicity and singleness of heart, far from bordering on weakness, had the safeguard of an excellent understanding, enlarged by extensive reading, and strengthened by the habit of conversing with sensible persons. Her discernment being as clear as her principles were firm, no one detected sophistry so quickly, or held in more contempt the sentimental cant sometimes employed to give wrong a colour of right. And however averse to think ill of another, yet, when once convinced, she never wavered as to the conduct she should pursue; but was in her proper element only while indulging visions of perfection, and extolling all that appeared to her great and good. One remarkable particular cannot be passed over. After having survived many of those dearest to her, she fell into bad health, and for the last six or seven years seldom enjoyed an hour free from pain; yet it neither soured her temper nor crushed her elastic spirit. There was not the least abatement of eagerness to benefit and gratify others. Nor, notwithstanding her bodily decrepitude, could she be connected with the idea of old age; for the outward frame alone had grown old the mind, continuing buoyant, retained the energy and vivacity, as well as the purity of early youth. Whenever intervals of comparative ease allowed her to converse, she soon made it evident that not only her memory and judgment were in their fullest vigour, but her imagination also: in short, she was now as apt, as in her brightest days, to be carried out of herself by any thing that touched her feelings or kindled her enthusiasm. All suffering ceased about a week before her end. Perfectly tranquil and collected, she died in a Christian's faith, hope, and peace. Married. Sir C. M. L. Monek, of Belsay, Northumberland, Bart. to Lady Mary Elizabeth Bennet, sister to the Earl of Tankerville. At Broadclist, the Rev. E. E. Coleridge, daughter of the late Rev. G. Tucker. M.A. of Buckerell, Devon, to Elizabeth, eldest At Compton Dando, Somersetshire, the Rev. T. Collins, Rector of Timsbury, to Elizabeth Ayliffe, youngest daughter of the late E. Boodle, Esq. of Brook Street, Grosvenor Square. At Chipping Barnet, the Rev. T. Brown, M.A., to Jane Lewis, youngest daughter of J. Goodyear, Esq. of Barnet. Died.-At his Chambers, in Lincoln's Inn, Richard Duppa, Esq. At Ramsgate, Edward Ellis, B.A. the eldest At the Vicarage, Islcham, Cambridgeshire, the Rev. F. Winstanley. At Aston-le-Wall, Northamptonshire, the the Rev. R. Webster, B.D. At Bradford Colliery, near Manchester, R. Bradley, aged 105. At Lambeth Rectory, Francis, eldest son of the Rev. Dr. D'Oyly. The Rev. T. H. Clough, M.A. of Jesus College, Oxford. At Croft Casle, Herefordshire, the Rev. J. Kevill, B.D. late fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. OCTOBER, 1831. LITERATURE. NOTICES OF NEW WORKS. Facts relating to the Punishment of Death in the Metropolis. By EDWARD GIBBON WAKEFIELD, Esq. 12mo. Ridgway. Mr. Wakefield improved the hours of his imprisonment, judging from this little volume. It contains matter well worthy the close observation of legislators and magistrates. We have long thought that, in the treatment of offenders against the laws, not less than in the enactment of many of those laws themselves, the book of human nature, the bias of the human heart, has been too little consulted. Legislators, in this country more especially, have been accustomed to make laws without the slightest regard to equity. Convenience or expediency we find to be the plea for punishments rivalled only in the code of Draco. While we assume, with no slight semblance of hypocrisy, that we are a most merciful, and rational, and thinking people, we legislate without regard to the admitted principles of justice, in utter scorn of individual wrong, so far as the really injured party is concerned ; and we make a wrong in property of the smallest amount, and committed without violence, or it may be under circumstances of strong temptation through the neglect of the owner, of far more importance than human blood. What monstrous cant we perpetually hear from judges and lawyers on this subject! We fear that, in enacting laws, those whose business it should be to carry the written law into effect, have sometimes too much to do with law-making. When we hear that punishments are only for the sake of example; when we find a judge telling a culprit that he is punished to deter others, and, therefore, more severely, that he may serve as an example, we are disgusted. When we see the great principle of the Mosaic, and the rational mode of punishment, set at nought— namely, the principle of compensation to the injured party; and, instead, have the nonsense of a social injury having been inflicted, and that the amend is due only to society; while, it may be, the sheriff, or constable, or thief-taker, pockets the stolen property, and leaves the real sufferer from the crime as much as ever injured-we feel that our code is a monstrous anomaly, and our system of criminal law based on the violation of private right. Where reason predominates, justice is not vengeance nor example, however the latter be a secondary object. The first principle of justice is compensation to the injured at the expense of the guilty. It is in vain to din into our ears that if A robs B of his last guinea, B is not injured, but that society is the sufferer, and, for making society suffer, the offender is to be punished. The thief, in the Mosaic code, was to restore fourfold-a much closer resemblance to justice than hanging A, making B pay part of the expences of prosecution, and dividing the stolen property found upon the thief, and the clothes on his back, between the executioner and thief-taker, or sheriff and the king. Surely the first object should be to redress the injury inflicted, wherever it be possible. If the crime be theft of any class, and the majority of offences are of that description, every possible effort should be exerted to make good the loss out of the criminal's property, as far as it will go. Neither king, nor sheriff, nor thief-taker should share in it, until the restoration was, if possible, made. This done away, the surplus might go to the king, or, more properly, to support the expenses of public justice. If there be no property, the labour of the criminal, in chains if necessary, should October, 1831.-VOL. II. NO, VI, C be taxed for the purpose in a penitentiary; where he should labour, not until so many years are expired, which means nothing, but until he had made good thrice the value by his toil under privation and restraint; and never until this was the case should the criminal be free. To such a system might be added transportation for a term or for life, and the task be performed in a penal settlement. In no case should a pardon be given, until the party wronged was equitably satisfied for his loss by the restoration of its full value. Then the expenses of the proceedings against him, and even of his deportation, should be cleared together, with once, twice, or thrice, as the sentence might be, the value of the property in addition, which had been wrongfully appropriated. In certain cases the latter might be remitted, the former never. This is the best mode of punishment in our opinion, because it is the most equitable. We are surprised it forms no part of the consideration, even where the most consistent modes of punishment are adopted, and extensive penitentiaries are erected. Such a mode too would give a scale of punishments, a gradation so difficult to apportion according to the present strange mode of adjudging law penalties, and would have a tendency to lessen the extent of the offence, and the consequent amount of the injury inflicted. But we forget Mr. Wakefield's book, and a most striking and useful one it is; for it deals with facts; and while it reveals much that has hitherto been under a seal to the world, it exhibits another proof of the inveteracy of bad customs, even in the recesses of our gaols. But the most valuable part of it is that which lays open the conduct and apparent feelings of the prisoners under sentence of death, or while awaiting lesser punishments, as well as the singular demoralization of those who commit felonies and larcenies in the metropolis. It informs us, curiously enough, or at least we gather from it, that the practice of our law relative to murderers is more humane than to any other convicts who are destined to suffer death. The murderer, the moment he is convicted, knows the hour of his doom, and is spared being made a spectacle of in religious ceremonies; in which the felon, if he be of a nervous temperament, is terrified to the extreme of suffering; or made to play the hypocrite, and kept for weeks between death and life in horrible uncertainty of his doom. Men in this state wear away to skeletons. When the Recorder's report is known, often the least guilty are among the sufferers, and the worst ruffians are spared the gibbet. The youth who has stolen above the value of 51. is a far greater sufferer before execution than he who has dipped his hands in the blood of a fellow-creature. In forty-eight hours, or a little longer, the murderer's remorse, if he has any, ends. He is let alone, in a solitary cell, and visited by a spiritual guide. He rarely finds fault with the justice of his sentence, unless he be a most hardened villain indeed. He places all his thoughts on another world; and, knowing his fate is sure, makes up his mind to meet it with firmness, and, generally, with confession and repentance. The other has a full sense of the injustice of the law which takes his life for his offence. He looks forward to a chance of pardon. He imagines that his life may be spared, and plays the hero upon this hope among his fellows. He reasons, very naturally, that if he suffers, God cannot look upon his offence as of that enormity with which the law regards it, and he feels that he suffers therefore unjustly. Men in the present day reason, and rightly too, upon simple questions; and they will not be made to believe that a law is just because it is an act of parliament, however they may be constrained to suffer under it. Hence nothing is so essential as that laws should be just. British legislators have gone upon the pernicious and unjustifiable principle of increasing punishment to the utmost possible extent, in most cases, not in proportion to the injury inflicted, or its magnitude, but to the frequency of the crime. For him who steals to the amount of five pounds in a dwelling-house, and to the villain who breaks into it in the dead of night and commits fearful violence on its inmates, the same punishment is writ. This unjust and unreasonable mode of adjudging for different offences, has given rise to the uncertainty of the greater punishment being inflicted at all-an evil of enormous magnitude.. Yet such is the dislike on the part of judges (for we fully believe they influence legislators too much) to part with the power of punishing, when they see fit, to the utmost possible extreme of punishment, that the evil has never been remedied; though it is acknowledged by those who ought to be aware, that he, whose duty it is to carry the written law into effect, is the worst qualified of any man to legislate, inasmuch as he is accustomed to deal only with fact, and, nine times out of ten, is the most ignorant of the workings of the human mind, or of the philosophy of the human heart, if we may so speak, of any one in the community. It is sufficient to read Mr. Wakefield's book to see what a bungling and careless affair is the selection of criminals for execution from the mass of the condemned; and that he who most deserves death often escapes. Mr. Wakefield's remarks on the temper of judges are excellent; and on the operation of their amour propre upon their conduct. The uncertainty of the execution of capital punishment is nothing less than torture, and is prolonged with a refinement in cruelty for weeks. "In several instances," says Mr. W., "I have seen brown hair turned grey, and grey white, by a month of suspense, such as most London capital convicts undergo. In the same short period, the smooth face of a man of twenty-five becomes often marked with decided wrinkles on the forehead, and about the eyes and mouth." Every time of Divine Service he is condemned to hear a sermon preached with the intention of arousing his feelings to his situation and probable destiny. With many, hardiness of demeanour ill covers the worm within-exhibited to show to their fellows manliness and spirit on a public occasion. When the culprit is almost arrived at the pitch of indifference to any fate-reduced to a skeleton by anxiety and low diet, and scarcely able to totter to the scaffold, he is informed his life is spared; only one or two, out of several dozen in the same situation, are to pay the extreme penalty of the law. The murderer's fate is certain his religious admonitions are given privately, where there can be no spirit of emulation aroused to excel a fellow-criminal in bravery, and often with far greater success on the part of the spiritual adviser, than among those who, for comparatively no crime at all, suffer worse than twenty deaths. As in all similar cases, there is a re-action on the part of the criminal whose sentence is commuted. He, if an old offender, (as is most probable, for Mr. W. says, out of twenty-five condemned, twenty are saved; and out of the five ordered for execution, two or three out of the five are least guilty, and half of the twenty spared are the worst offenders ;)-if an old offender, he gives vent to his joy in curses of the laws and the judges who condemned him; he blasphemes, and is guilty of every outrage his situation will admit. We can proceed no further on this subject, but recommend Mr. Wakefield's book to the serious attention of all readers. Not only our criminal laws alone must be revised, -we must treat our criminals differently, or the effect of legal penalties will still be inefficient. Punishments must be quick and certain, humanely graduated in proportion to the guilt of offenders. The compensative principle of justice too must, as nations become less barbarous in the administration of their laws, make a part of their formation. The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, with the most celebrated Persons of his time, &c. Vol. I. 4to. Colburn and Co. We signified an intention of again returning to this work, which has great claims on our attention in the way of amusement and information. We propose to give two or three of the letters, that the public may see the nature of the correspondence. We greatly deprecate the expence of the work, and trust, at no distant time, the world will be favoured with a cheap octavo edition. The first letter we shall extract, is from Gilbert Walmesley, whom every one acquainted with the life of Dr. Johnson will recollect. It is a recommendation to a Mr. Colson to instruct young Garrick. "My dear old Friend, Lichfield, Feb. 5, 1736. Having not been in town since the year thirty-one, you will the less wonder at seeing a letter from me. But I have the pleasure of hearing of you sometimes in the prints, and am glad to see you are daily throwing in your valuable contributions to the Republic of Letters. But the present occasion of my writing, is a favour I have to ask of you. My neighbour Captain Garrick (who is an honest, valuable man) has a son, who is a very sensible young fellow and a good scholar, and whom the Captain hopes, in some two or three years, he shall be able to send to the Temple, and breed to the Bar. But, at present, his pocket will not hold out for sending him to the University. I have proposed your taking him, if you think well of it, and your boarding him, and instructing him in mathematics, and philosophy, and humane learning. He is now nineteen, of sober and good dispositions, and is as ingenious and promising a young man as ever I knew in my life. Few instructions on your side will do, and, in the interval of study, he will be an agreeable companion for you. His father will be glad to pay you whatever you shall require that is within his reach; and I shall think myself very much obliged to you into the bargain. This young gentleman, you must know, has been much with me, ever since he was a child, almost every day; and I have taken a pleasure often in instructing him, and have a great affection and esteem for him; and I doubt not but you will soon have the like, if it suit your convenience to take him into your family. You will be so good, as soon as you have considered of this affair, to write to me. Having changed my condition of life, (being tired since the death of my brother of living quite alone,) my chances for seeing London are now become more hazardous than ever. But you know I never came thither in my life without enquiring after you; and, therefore, I am not without hopes, especially if David Garrick comes to be your pupil, but you will contrive to spend a month or six weeks with me at Lichfield in the summer. I shall always have a bed for you, and a stall for your horse; and nothing I do assure you in life will give me a greater pleasure. Captain Garrick and the young gentleman beg your acceptance of their compliments; and I am ever with the greatest truth, dear Sir, your most affectionate old friend, and humble servant, GILBERT WALMESLEY." "To the Rev. Mr. Colson, at his house in Rochester, Kent, By way of London. A single sheet." This first letter is a testimony too of the good character which Garrick bore among his friends, as well as of the limited circumstances of his family. It also shows that his education was good, his scholarship being favourably spoken of as well as good sense. In the following letter, Garrick is linked with a friend, a still greater name than his own. GILBERT WALMESLEY to the REV. MR. COLSON. Lichfield, March 2, 1736-7. "Dear Sir, "I had the favour of yours, and am extremely obliged to you; but cannot say I have a greater affection for you upon it than I had before, being long since so much endeared to you, as well by an early friendship, as by your many excellent and valuable qualifications; and, had I a son of my own, it would be my ambition, instead of sending him to the University, to dispose of him as this young gentleman is. He and another neighbour of mine, one Mr. Johnson, set out this morning for London together: Davy Garrick is to be with you early the next week; and Mr. Johnson to try his fate with a tragedy, and to see to get himself employed in some translation, either from the Latin or the French. Johnson is a very good scholar and poet, and I have great hopes will turn out a fine tragedy-writer. If it should any ways lie in your way, I doubt not but you would be ready to recommend and assist your countryman. If I cannot be so happy as to see you here this summer, I shall depend upon it next; and your pupil's coming hither then, will, I hope, be an inducement. I am, ever, dear Sir, your most obliged, and most affectionate humble servant, GILBERT WALMESLEY." "To the Rev. Mr. Colson, at his house in Rochester, Kent. By way of London." Endorsed, "Mr. Walmesley.-Letters about me and Mr. Johnson." The following letters relate to the celebrated Junius: the first we have before seen in the edition of the letters of that celebrated unknown, published a few years ago by Woodfall. JUNIUS to MR. GARRICK. "Nov. 10, 1771. "I am very exactly informed of your practices, and of the information you so busily sent to Richmond, and with what triumph and exultation it was received. I knew every particular of it the next day. Now, mark me, vagabond! Keep to your pantomimes, or be sure you shall hear of it. Meddle no more, thou busy informer! It is in my power to make you curse the hour in which you dared to interfere with JUNIUS." |