Si quis te rogaret, cur tale sertum gererem,
Dic, "Omne propter coroulum qui est inpartibus."'
Allusions to the willow, as an emblem of grief, are of a very old date. 'Sing all, a green willow must be my garland,' is the refrain of the song which haunted Desdemona on the eve of her death (Othello, Act IV., Scene 3). That exquisite scene, and the beautiful air to which some contemporary of Shakespeare wedded it, will make 'The Willow Song' immortal.
[107] Madame Laffarge and Daniel Good were the two most talked about criminals of the time when these lines were written. Madame Laffarge was convicted of poisoning her husband under extenuating circumstances, and was imprisoned for life, but many believed in her protestations of innocence—this, of course, she being a woman and unhappily married. Daniel Good died on the scaffold on the 23rd of May, 1842, protesting his innocence to the last, and asserting that his victim, Jane Sparks, had killed herself, an assertion which a judge and jury naturally could not reconcile with the fact that her head, arms, and legs had been cut off and hidden with her body in a stable. He, too, found people to maintain that his sentence was unjust.
[108] The two papers here glanced at were The Age and The Satirist, long since dead.
[109] The expression of contemptuous defiance, signified by the application of the thumb of one hand to the nose, spreading out the fingers, and attaching to the little finger the stretched-out fingers of the other hand, and working them in a circle. Among the graffiti in Pompeii are examples of the same subtle symbolism.
[110] Well known to readers of Thackeray's Newcomes as 'The Cave of Harmony.'
[111] Sir Peter Laurie, Lord Mayor; afterwards Alderman, and notable for his sagacity and severity as a magistrate in dealing with evil-doers.
[112] Thin boards.
[113] Burnt.