Not he—nor the opinion of the whole world, either. There—let him go—his place in the future is at any rate decided on. And yet the vindicator of Floyd intends, we are told, to vindicate himself!
A late 'horrible and agonizing execution' of two murderers in cultivated and Christian England was witnessed by one hundred thousand people!—according to the London Times. In the first-class English journals a large space is always devoted to police reports, in which the vilest and most vulgar criminal cases are always given in full detail, to gratify the almost universal British craving for filth and cruelty. A drunken vagabond cannot maim his wife but all England must know all about it. Let it be borne in mind that while English writers are never weary of speaking of the blackguardism of the American press, nine tenths of our journals abandoned many years ago the abominable practice of regularly publishing police cases; and that, making every allowance, English newspapers at present publish on an average ten times as much demoralizing matter as the American.
We clip the following from the Boston Post:
'Speaking of the heathen names reminds the London Athenæum of what M. Salverte says with respect to that fairest of the heroines in that poem for all spring time, "Lalla Rookh." Everybody, in his happy turn, has been in love with that lady of the peerless enchantments: perhaps they will be taken a little aback when they hear that before the lord of the East gave her the name of Nourmahal, 'Light of the Harem,' or, in the later excess of his love, Nourdjihan, 'Light of the World,' she was known to her family and friends as Mher-ul-Nica, or, in equivalent Saxon, the 'Strapping Wench;' and that this 'tallest of women,' of whom it is said her lover, Djihanguyr,
——preferred in his heart the least ringlet that curl'd
Down her exquisite neck, to the throne of the world,
only became the light of his harem by the process of cutting the throat of her first husband. If this annotation, to be made in all copies of the poem, do not wring all charm out of the names by which the poet's lady is known to fame, then fiction again will prove stronger than fact.'
'And that isn't all, either.' For Noor-Mahal, albeit conventionally used as Light of the Harem, does mean Light of the Workshop in Arabic. We shouldn't in the least wonder if the lady in question, in her earlier and better-behaved days, had been chief engineer of a sewing machine at two shillings a day. However, we set that down to her credit side.