ENGLISH AND FRENCH MURDERS.
When will the French nation be able to afford a Thurtell—a man who could turn his pistol round in his friend's brains; not in any insane paroxysm of jealousy, or hatred, or revenge, but merely to ascertain satisfactorily that he had completely effected his business—who could then walk in to his supper of pork chops, with the same composure as if he had come from giving a feed of oats to his horse—a clever and acute man, too, without any stupid insensibility of mind—a man who, when seized and put on his trial, gets off by heart a long and eloquent speech, full of the most solemn and false asseverations of his innocence; not that he clung with desperate eagerness to the hope of escaping, but that, as there was a chance, it was prudent not to throw it away—who, when condemned displayed neither terror nor indifference, neither exquisite sensibility nor sullen brutality, and at the last swung out of life from the gallows with the settled air of a man who feels he has lost the game at which he played, and that he may as well pay the stake calmly? There was a true British composure about the unutterable atrocity of this villain—murderer he was, and a most detestable murderer too—but his character belongs to our country as fully as that of our heroes. Hunt and Probert were pitiful wretches, fit for the Bicêtre. Doubtless the agony of Hunt's feelings until his reprieve came, would, if properly divided into chapters, make a good romance.—Blackwood's Mag.