WAX FIGURES OF AMERICANS.
The Museum contains, among other curiosities that are of interest, the identical coach used by Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo, with a vast number of other relics of the great Corsican. From the number of Napoleonic relics I fancy that the Madame was at heart a French woman, though she was making her money from the English.
Great halls are filled with correct statuary in wax of the world’s great, or notorious men, all of which have to be “done,” as a matter of course.
But the great point, and one which no visitor ever fails to visit is the “Chamber of Horrors.” You pay a sixpence extra—there is always sixpence extra in England—and you are introduced to the most cheerful assemblage of monsters that the world has ever produced.
If there ever was a murder committed of an especially atrocious description, one done under peculiarly horrifying and terrible circumstances, here is a wax figure of the murderer, and, if possible, of the victim.
There is the original guillotine which made the acquaintance of so many necks during the various French revolutions. There is the identical scaffold which was devised by a man condemned to be hung, and on which he suffered, with forty-eight others afterward, before it was retired, and there are ropes and delightful articles of that nature with which criminals have suffered, and in such numbers that we come to the conclusion that the principal business of the English and French is to kill somebody and get hung for it.
The two criminals in which I took the liveliest interest were Messrs. Burke and Hare, of Edinburgh, Scotland. These gentlemen had a contract with the medical university of Edinburgh, to furnish the students with corpses for dissection, which they did by resurrecting them from various church-yards.
Mr. Burke, who was evidently the leader in the enterprise, remarked one night to Mr. Hare,—that is, I presume he did:
“Why go out this dark and rainy night and dig in the damp earth for corpses? Digging corpses is all wrong. If the friends of the deceased should ever discover that a corpse had been abstracted it would occasion the most profound feeling. We should have more respect for the survivors than to raise their dead, and then, in the interest of science, we should give the students fresher bodies for dissection. I am inflexibly opposed to digging any more.”