The Book-Hunter / A New Edition, with a Memoir of the Author

by John Hill Burton

Here is another, very comprehensive, and worth a little library of modern statute-books, if it was duly enforced:—

"Item, it is statute and ordained, that all our Sovereign lord's lieges being under his obeisance, and especially the Isles, be ruled by our Sovereign lord's own laws, and the common laws of the realm, and none other laws."

The Irish statute-book conveys more expressively than any narrative the motley contrasts of a history in the fabric of which the grotesque and the tragic are so closely interwoven. So early as the middle of the sixteenth century, English statesmen discover usquebaugh, and pass an act to extinguish it at once: "forasmuch as aqua vitæ, a drink nothing profitable to be daily drunken and used, is now universally throughout this realm of Ireland made, and especially in the borders of the Irishry, and for the furniture of Irishmen, and thereby much corn, grain, and other things are consumed, spent, and wasted," and so forth.

To get men to shave and wash themselves, and generally to conform to the standard of civilisation in their day, seems innocent if not laudable; yet is there a world of heartburning, strife, oppression, and retaliatory hatred expressed in the title of "an act, that the Irishmen dwelling in the counties of Dublin, Meath, Uriell, and Kildare, shall go apparelled like Englishmen, and wear their beards after the English manner, swear allegiance, and take English surnames." Further on we have a whole series of acts, with a conjunction of epithets in their titles which, at the present day, sounds rather startling, "for the better suppressing Tories, Robbers, and Rapparees, and for preventing robberies, burglaries, and other heinous crimes." The classes so associated having an unreasonable dislike of being killed, difficulties are thus put in the way of those beneficially employed in killing them, insomuch that they, "upon the killing of any one of their number, are thereby so alarmed and put upon their keeping, that it hath been found impracticable for such person or persons to discover and apprehend or kill any more of them, whereby they are discouraged from discovering and apprehending or killing," and so forth. There is a strange and melancholy historical interest in these grotesque enactments, since they almost verbatim repeat the legislation about the Highland clans passed a century earlier by the Lowland Parliament of Scotland.

There is one shelf of the law library laden with a store of which few will deny the attractive interest—that devoted to the literature of Criminal Trials. It will go hard indeed, if, besides the reports of mere technicalities, there be not here some glimpses of the sad romances which lie at their heart; and, at all events, when the page passes a very slight degree beyond the strictly professional, the technicalities will be found mingled with abundant narrative. The State Trials, for instance—surely a lawyer's book—contains the materials of a thousand romances: nor are these all attached to political offences; as, fortunately, the book is better than its name, and makes a virtuous effort to embrace all the remarkable trials coming within the long period covered by the collection. Some assistance may be got, at the same time, from minor luminaries, such as the Newgate Calendar—not to be commended, certainly, for its literary merits, but full of matters strange and horrible, which, like the gloomy forest of the Castle of Indolence, "sent forth a sleepy horror through the blood."

There are many other books where records of remarkable crimes are mixed up with much rubbish, as, The Terrific Register, God's Revenge against Murder, a little French book called Histoire Générale des Larrons (1623), and if the inquirer's taste turn towards maritime crimes, The History of the Bucaniers, by Esquemeling. A little work in four volumes, called the Criminal Recorder, by a student in the Inner Temple, can be commended as a sort of encyclopædia of this kind of literature. It professes—and is not far from accomplishing the profession—to give biographical sketches of notorious public characters, including "murderers, traitors, pirates, mutineers, incendiaries, defrauders, rioters, sharpers, highwaymen, footpads, pickpockets, swindlers, housebreakers, coiners, receivers, extortioners, and other noted persons who have suffered the sentence of the law for criminal offences." By far the most luxurious book of this kind, however, in the English language, is Captain Johnston's Lives of Highwaymen and Pirates. It is rare to find it now complete. The old folio editions have been often mutilated by over use; the many later editions in octavo are mutilated by design of their editors; and for conveying any idea of the rough truthful descriptiveness of a book compiled in the palmy days of highway robbery, they are worthless.

All our literature of that nature must, however, yield to the French Causes Célèbres, a term rendered so significant by the value and interest of the book it names, as to have been borrowed by writers in this country to render their works attractive. It must be noted as a reason for the success of this work, and also of the German collection by Feuerbach, that the despotic Continental method of procedure by secret inquiry affords much better material for narrative than ours by open trial. We make, no doubt, a great drama of a criminal trial. Everything is brought on the stage at once, and cleared off before an audience excited so as no player ever could excite; but it loses in reading; while the Continental inquiry, with its slow secret development of the plot, makes the better novel for the fireside.

There is a method by which, among ourselves, the trial can be imbedded in a narrative which may carry down to later generations a condensed reflection of that protracted expectation and excitement which disturb society during the investigations and trials occasioned by any great crime. This is by "illustrating" the trial, through a process resembling that which has been already supposed to have been applied to one of Watts's hymns. In this instance there will be all the newspaper scraps—all the hawker's broadsides—the portraits of the criminal, of the chief witnesses, the judges, the counsel, and various other persons,—everything in literature or art that bears on the great question.

He who inherits or has been able to procure a collection of such illustrated trials, a century or so old, is deemed fortunate among collectors, for he can at any time raise up for himself the spectre as it were of the great mystery and exposure that for weeks was the absorbing topic of attraction for millions. The curtains are down—the fire burns bright—the cat purrs on the rug; Atticus, soused in his easy-chair, cannot be at the trouble of going to see Macbeth or Othello—he will sup full of horrors from his own stores. Accordingly he takes down an unseemly volume, characterised by a flabby obesity by reason of the unequal size of the papers contained in it, all being bound to the back, while the largest only reach the margin. The first thing at opening is the dingy pea-green-looking paragraph from the provincial newspaper, describing how the reapers, going to their work at dawn, saw the clay beaten with the marks of struggle, and, following the dictates of curiosity, saw a bloody rag sticking on a tree, the leaves also streaked with red, and, lastly, the instrument of violence hidden in the moss; next comes from another source the lamentations for a young woman who had left her home—then the excitement of putting that and that together—the search, and the discovery of the body. The next paragraph turns suspense into exulting wrath: the perpetrator has been found with his bloody shirt on—a scowling murderous villain as ever was seen—an eminent poacher, and fit for anything. But the next paragraph turns the tables. The ruffian had his own secrets of what he had been about that night, and at last makes a clean breast. It would have been a bad business for him at any other time, but now he is a revealing angel, for he noted this and that in the course of his own little game, and gives justice the thread which leads to a wonderful romance, and brings home desperate crime to that quarter where, from rank, education, and profession, it was least likely to be found. Then comes the trial and the execution; and so, at a sitting, has been swallowed all that excitement which, at some time long ago, chained up the public in protracted suspense for weeks.

The reader will see, from what I have just been saying, that I am not prepared to back Charles Lamb's Index Expurgatorius.[49] It is difficult, almost impossible, to find the book from which something either valuable or amusing may not be found, if the proper alembic be applied. I know books that are curious, and really amusing, from their excessive badness. If you want to find precisely how a thing ought not to be said, you take one of them down, and make it perform the service of the intoxicated Spartan slave. There are some volumes in which, at a chance opening, you are certain to find a mere platitude delivered in the most superb and amazing climax of big words, and others in which you have a like happy facility in finding every proposition stated with its stern forward, as sailors say, or in some other grotesque mismanagement of composition. There are no better farces on or off the stage than when two or three congenial spirits ransack books of this kind, and compete with each other in taking fun out of them.