The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Court of Cacus, by Alexander Leighton

THE COURT OF CACUS;

OR,

The Story of Burke and Hare.

BY
ALEXANDER LEIGHTON,
AUTHOR OF “CURIOUS STORIED TRADITIONS OF SCOTTISH LIFE,” ETC.

LONDON:
HOULSTON AND WRIGHT, PATERNOSTER ROW.
EDINBURGH: W. P. NIMMO, ST DAVID STREET.
1861.

EDINBURGH:
PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE AND COMPANY,
PAUL’S WORK.

PREFACE.

I have not written this book,—narrating a series of tragedies unprecedented in the history of mankind, as well for the number of victims and the depth of their sufferings as for the sordid temptation of the actors,—without a proper consideration of what is due to the public and myself. If I had thought I was to contribute to the increase of a taste for moral stimulants, said to be peculiarly incident to our age—and yet, I suspect, as strong in all bygone times—and without any countervailing advantage to morals and the welfare of society, I would have desisted from my labours. But, being satisfied that what has really occurred on the stage of the world, however involving the dignity of our nature or revolting to human feelings, must and will be known in some way, wherever there are eyes to read or ears to hear, nay, was intended to be known by Him through whose permission it was allowed to be, I consider it a benefaction that the knowledge which kills shall be accompanied by the knowledge which cures. Nay, were it possible, which it is not, to keep from succeeding generations cases of great depravity punished for example, and atoned for by penitence, the man who tried to conceal them would be acting neither in obedience to God’s providence nor for the good of the people. We know what the Bible records of the doings of depraved men, and we know also for what purpose; and may we not follow in the steps of the inspired?

But a slight survey of the nature of the mind may satisfy any one, not necessarily a philosopher, that it requires as its natural food examples of evil with the punishment and the cure. If it had been so ordered that there were not in the soil of the heart congenital germs of wickedness ready to spring up and branch into crimes under favouring circumstances, which the complications of society are eternally producing, and that, consequently, all evil was sheer imitation, something might be said for concealing the thing to be imitated, even at the expense of losing the antidote. Even in that case the “huddlers-up” would not be very philosophical or very sensible; religious they could not be, because the supposition is adverse to the most fundamental truth of Christianity—for, as the imitation must of necessity be admitted to be catching, where so many are caught, the deterring influences would be more necessary. But as all must admit that the evil comes of itself and the antidote from man, those who would conceal the latter must allow to the former its full sway.

In all this, I do not overlook the benefits of abstract representations of the beauty of virtue and the ugliness of vice. These belong to the department of the imagination, where no principle of action resides; and every one knows that the images must be embodied, in particular instances taken from the real world of flesh and blood, so that the historian of real occurrences must still work as an adjunct even to the fancy. If it be said that he narrates stories that are revolting, the answer would seem to be that, as the law still justifies example, and society calls for it, the objection that the interest of a story is too deep can only be used by those who view the records of wickedness as a stimulant and not as a terror, or those who, amidst the still-recurring daily murders, consider society as beyond the need of amendment. The objection is thus an adjection. Fortunately, none of us are acquainted with amiable enormities, and the longer these remain unknown to us, the better for us and mankind; so that it seems to follow, that he who can render the acted crimes of history as disagreeable and hateful as they can be made, even with the aid of the dark shadows of his fancy, performs an act favourable to the interests of society. Yet I have done my best to save from revolt the feelings of the virtuous, as far as is consistent with the moral effect intended by Providence to be produced on the vicious.

York Lodge, Trinity, September 1861.

CONTENTS.

First Appearance in Surgeon’s Square.

When the gloaming was setting in of an evening in the autumn of 1827, and when the young students of Dr Knox’s class had covered up those remains of their own kind from which they had been trying to extract nature’s secrets, one was looking listlessly from the window into the Square. The place was as quiet as usual, silent and sad enough to gratify a fancy that there existed some connexion between the stillness and the work carried on from day to day and night to night in these mysterious recesses; for, strange enough, whatever curiosity might be felt by the inhabitants as to what was done there, few were ever seen within that area except those in some way connected with the rooms. So was it the more likely that our young student’s eye should have been attracted by the figure of a man moving stealthily under the shade of the houses. Then he looked more intently to ascertain whether he was not one of the regular staff of body-snatchers who supplied “the thing,” as they called it. But no; the stranger, whoever he might be, was neither “Merryandrew,” nor “the Spune,” nor “the Captain,” nor any other of the gouls,—some half-dozen,—yet he would have done no discredit to the fraternity either as to dress or manner: little and thick-set, with a firm round face, small eyes, and Irish nose, a down-looking sleazy dog, who, as he furtively turned his eye up to the window, seemed to think he had no right to direct his vision beyond the parallel of a man’s pocket.

The student, who could dissect living character no less than he could dead tissue, immediately suspected that this meditative “worshipper of the sweets of eve” was there upon business, but, being probably new to the calling, he was timid, if not bashful. Yes, bashful; we do not retract the word, comely as it is, for where, in all this wide world of sin and shamelessness, could we suppose it possible to find a man who lives upon it, and is shone on by its sun, and cheered by its flowers, capable of selling the body of his fellow-creature for gold without having his face suffused with blood, cast up by the indignant heart, at least for the first time? And perhaps it was the first time to this new-comer. But in whatever condition the strange man might be, the student had got over his weakness, that is, nature’s strength, and, resolving to test the lounger, he went down, and, shewing himself at the door, beckoned the bashful one forward.

“Were you looking for any one?” said he, as he peered into the down-looking face, where there never had been a blush.

“’Mph!—are you Dr Knox?”

“No; but I am one of his students,” was the reply of the young man, who was now nearly satisfied of the intention of the stranger.

“And, sure, I’m not far wrong thin, afther all.”

“And I may suit your purpose as well, perhaps.”

“Perhaps.”

“Well, speak out; don’t be afraid. Have you got ‘the thing?’”

“Doun’t know what you mean.”

“Ah! not an old hand, I perceive. You were never here before?”

“No.”

“And don’t know what to say?”

“No.”

And the bashful man again turned his gloomy eyes to the ground, and didn’t know what to do with those hands of his, which were not made for kid—perhaps for skin of another kind. And shouldn’t this hardened student have been sorry for a man in such confusion; but he wasn’t—nay, he had no sympathy with his refinement.

“Why, man, don’t you speak out?” he said impatiently.

“There’s some one coming through the Square there,” was the reply, as the man looked furtively to a side.

“Come in here, then,” said the student, as he pulled him into a large room where there were three young men who acted as Knox’s assistants.

And there they were in the midst of a great number of coarse tables, with one large one in the middle, whereon were deposited—each having its portion—masses or lumps of some matter which could not be seen by reason of all of them being covered with pieces of cloth—once white, but now dirty gray, as if they had been soiled with clammy hands for weeks or months. Nor were these signs, though unmistakeable to even the neophyte, all that there spoke with a terrible eloquence of man’s lowly destiny upon earth; ay, and of man’s pride too, even that pride of science which makes such a fool of him in the very midst of the evidences of his corruption; for although the windows were opened a little way, the choking air, thick with gases which, in other circumstances, the free wind carries off to dissipate and purify in the storm, pressed heavily upon the lungs, so that even the uninitiated shrank with unfeigned feeling, as if he shuddered under an awe that was perfectly foreign to his rough nature.

“Sure, and I’m among the dead,” said the man, whom the reader will have discovered to be an Irishman; “and I have something ov that kind to——”

“Sell,” added one assistant sharply, as, in his scientific ardour, he anticipated the merchant.

“Yes.”

And now the bashful man was relieved of his burden of shame, light or heavy as you please; but we verily say of some weight, as we have him at the beginning of a career which made the world ring till the echoes might have disturbed the gods, and we know that he was not otherwise without feelings pertaining to humanity; nay, we know, and shall tell, that on ONE occasion pity suffused an eye that was destined to be oftener and longer red with the fires of cruelty than was ever before in the world’s history the orb of a human being.

“And what do you give for wun?” he whispered, as he sidled up to the ear of the young anatomist who had been speaking to him.

“Sometimes as high as £10.”

And for certain, if the student had been curious enough to estimate the effect of such words upon such a man, to whom “ten pennies” would have been words of inspiration, he would have seen in that eye, no longer dull and muddy, the first access of that demon mammon, as by the touch upon the heart it raised the first pulses of a fever which was to grow and grow, till it dried up into a parched and senseless thing the fountain of pity; for, however inoperative, we are bound to say it was still there, as if abiding God’s judgments—and transform one nature altogether into another—for a purpose.

“And wouldn’t you give a pound more for a fresh wun?” said he, with that intoxication of hope which sometimes makes a beggar play with a new-born fortune.

“Sometimes more and sometimes less,” replied the other; “but ‘the thing’ must always be seen.”

“And by my sowl it is a good thing, and worth the money any how.”

“Where is it?”

“At home.”

“Then if you will bring it here about ten it will be examined, and you will get your money; and since you are a beginner, I may tell you, you had better bring it in a box.”

“And have we not a tea-chest all ready, which howlds it nate, and will not my friend help me to bring it?”

“Well, mind the hour, and be upon your guard that no one sees you.”

And so the man, however much an adult in the common immorality of the world, in this singular crime as yet an infant, left to complete his sale of merchandise. It would not be easy to figure his thoughts,—perhaps more difficult to estimate his feelings,—yet it might be for good that we could analyse these states of the mind, which are nought other than diseases, that we might apply the cure which God has vouchsafed to our keeping; even as that student strove to inquire into the secrets of the body, that he might learn how to deal with the living frame when it is out of order, or, perhaps, hastening to a premature dissolution.

That man was William Burke, and we say this as a historian might have said, that man was Alexander of Macedon, or that Julius Caesar, or that Napoleon—all equally great, or at least great with the difference that the first as yet only desecrated the temple for money, and the others took from it the deity for ambition. Ay, and with this difference also, which time was to shew, that while there have been many slaughtering kings, there never was but one William Burke.

Intercalary.

The ardour of the study of anatomy was in the youth, and it was there from sympathy; yea, for years before, the Square and the College had been under the fervour of competition. Nor was this fervour limited to the Scottish metropolis, from which the fame of the successive Monroes had gone forth over the world. There had arisen Barclay, who, as an extra-academical lecturer, had the faculty of inspiring his students with all the zeal which he himself possessed, and to his class in the Square there had come students from England and Ireland, as well as foreign parts. Even in prior times, when the teaching was almost limited to the college, the reputation of the professors had so accumulated élèves that Scotland groaned, and groaned ineffectually, under the invasion of her sacred graveyards. The country teemed with stories, in which there figured the midnight adventures of those strange men who gained a living by supplying, at all hazards, what was so peremptorily required in the scientific hall and its adjacent rooms.[1] Anxious mourners visited by the light of the moon the places where their dear relatives lay entombed, as if they could thereby satisfy themselves that the beloved bodies still rested there in peace, though it was certain that the artists became in a short time so proficient in their work that they could leave a grave apparently as entire as it was at the time when the mourners deposited their burden. That these adventures should have taken strange and sometimes grimly-ludicrous turns might have been expected, and yet it is more true that they transcended belief.

There was one long current in Leven in Fife of a character more like fiction than truth. A middle-aged man of the name of Henderson had died of an acute fever, and was buried in due time. He left a widow and daughter, and we need not speak, even to those who have not experienced such privation, of the deep valley of grief through which it takes so long a time for the light of a living hope to penetrate, if, in some instances, it ever penetrates at all. Yet people must live, and the widow was to keep the small public-house in the skirts of the town which her husband had conducted. Six days had passed since the funeral, when one night, at a late hour, two men asked and got admittance for the purpose of refreshment, one of them, according to their statement, having been taken ill. They were introduced through a dark lobby into a room, where there was one of those close beds so common in Scotland, and left there with the drink they had ordered. By and by a loud knock came to the door, and the voice of an officer demanded to know if some thieves who had broken into a neighbouring house had there taken refuge. The noise and the impending search had reached the ears of the two men who had entered shortly before, and having had some good reason for being afraid of justice, they took advantage of a window and got out, but they had made so much noise in their flight, that the officers were directed to a pursuit, in which, however, they ultimately failed. On their return they thought of examining the room, with a view to ascertain whether the supposed thieves had left in their hurry any of the booty; but all that they found was an empty bag, which they took away with them for the purpose of an expected identification. The confusion having ceased, the widow, in the depth of her grief for her departed husband, went into the room to betake herself to bed. She approached it for the purpose of folding it down, and in an instant was transfixed; before her on the bed lay the dead body of her husband in those very grave-clothes made by her own hands, and in which, six days before, he had been buried. The explanation of the mystery was not difficult. The two men belonged to the College staff of body-snatchers; they had succeeded so far in their enterprise, and would with their burden have avoided all houses, if one of them had not been taken ill, and the other had not also wanted to participate in a restorative after their night’s work. It is supposed that, thinking themselves secure in the quiet house, they had taken the body out of the sack for some purpose only known to themselves, and thinking, when the noise got up, that the pursuit was after them, they had flung it into the close bed and flown.

Once upon a track of such grim romance, so rich in specimens of a bypast phase of society, it is not easy to get rid of it, nor is it any more wrong to pursue it so far, to shew our social ameliorations, than it is to search for underlying strata in the physical world, which tell us of a rudeness in Nature’s workings from which she progresses to more perfect organisms. Another of these stories is scarcely less interesting. A young student of the name of Burns saw one day on the big centre-table of the College practical hall what he considered to be the body of his mother. Rendered wild by the conviction, he flew out of the room, took a ticket for Dumfries, and, on arriving there, told his father (who, half-dead in grief, was confined to bed,) his terrible story. It was night, and the snow had been falling during the day, so that the graveyard was covered nearly a foot in depth, and one might have thought that the father would have put off the execution of a resolution, to which he came on the instant, of examining the grave, till the following day; but without saying a word, he rose deliberately, as if some new energy had seized him and restored him to the active duties of life, and betaking himself, accompanied by his son, to the place of sepulture, roused the sexton to the work of investigation. The lantern and the spade were put in requisition, and with the father and son as mute spectators, the green sod was removed and the mould shovelled out till the coffin was laid bare. Then the lid was unscrewed and taken off, and there lay, exposed to the eyes of the husband and the son, the body of the endeared one—the centre once of so many loves, and the source of so many domestic joys—calm in the stillness of death.

We have even a little poetry in some of these almost innumerable stories of a state of social polity that will never return again. One was a favourite of the students about 1818. One, George Duncan, from Angus, lodged in the Potterow with another of the name of Ferguson from a shire further north. They were both in love with a Miss Wilson, who resided somewhere about Bruntsfield Links; and so embittered were they by this feeling of rivalship, that they slept together, and ate their meals together, and walked and talked together, without ever the name of the girl being mentioned by either. There seemed to be a tacit admission that each knew that the other was in love with the same individual, and that each supposed the other the favourite, and that each hated the other with all the virulence of an unsuccessful competitor. In this strange state of things between two who had once been loving friends, Ferguson died of a disease the nature of which baffled the acuteness of the best surgeons, and in the course of a few days Duncan’s rival was consigned to a grave in the Buccleuch burying-ground. And now comes a far more singular part of the story. Duncan, in league with a noted snatcher at that time, called the “Screw,” from the adroit way in which he managed the extracting instrument, repaired, on the second night after the funeral, to the cemetery where poor Ferguson had been deposited, with a view to lifting the body and carrying it to Dr Monro’s room. It was late, and the moon shed more abundantly than the adventurers wished her soft light over the still graves, and especially that of him whose nineteenth summer sun had shown in a succession, with small interval, the smile of beauty and the grin of death. But if this poetry of nature did not affect the rival and the anatomist, something else did; for as the two slouched behind one of the grave-stones to conceal themselves till the glare of the moon should be hidden in a welcome cloud, who should be seen there, wrapped in a night-cloak, and hanging over the grave of Ferguson, but the object of their mutual affection? Nay, so near were they, that they heard her sobs and her ejaculations of “Henry, dear Henry,” and many others of those soft endearments with which the heart of grief is so eloquent. If the iron had entered into Duncan’s soul before, it now burned there in the red fire of his hatred. The sobbing figure rose and vanished, as do the night-visions of these places, so suggestive of flitting images, and within an hour the body of Ferguson was extended on the table within the College. Nor does the story end with this terrible satisfaction, for Duncan more than once afterwards, in the moonlit nights, witnessed from the same hiding-place, and with what satisfaction to his relentless soul may be guessed, the same offerings of the poor girl’s affection over an empty grave.

And so forth, through all the number of such stories as used to be rife at that time, but have now died away amidst narratives of a more living interest. But towards the close of Barclay’s labours, in his class the materials for such were rather on the increase, for the reason that the invasions on consecrated places kept a proportion to the requirements of an increasing class of students. Nor, when Barclay ceased to lecture, and was succeeded by Knox, did this Scotch shame undergo any diminution, if it did not wax more brazen in its features. Knox was destined, as well by his powers as a public lecturer as by his ambition and vindictive impatience of an intruder on his peculiar walk, and independently altogether of the dark suspicions which rose like thick exhalations out of the depths of the great tragedy subsequently enacted, to become a marked man, and the centre of attraction to ardent students. His ambition felt, too, the quickening spur of Liston, who, as an extra-academical lecturer on surgery, offered for even more than a national reputation. The professional emulation of these men soon degenerated into professional, if not personal hatred, scarcely alleviated by the collateral envy they both bore towards the academical professor, who, himself a good anatomist of the old school, with family honours not distinguished from a professional inheritance, could afford to view the new men with an easy if not proud disregard.

With these feelings among the lecturers, we may easily fancy the almost natural effects among the students, always remarkable for devotion to their teachers. The spirit of the latter went through them like an inoculation, and, while working in them as a rancour, it took the form, as in the elders, of a professional emulation. Nay, it seemed to become almost a frenzy among them, that those of one class should excel those of another in the knowledge of the human body. Questions came to be discussed among them, often suggested by faults imputed by one lecturer to another, and the quarrels of the masters thus became bones of contention among their scholars. An unsuccessful operation would be seized on as a pretext to run down the operator; and as the anatomical books could not always, or often, settle the dispute, the area of controversy would be in the halls of dissection. In this state of affairs, it behoved that the demand for subjects, which ever since the advent of Barclay had been on the increase, should become day by day more clamant, and the number of vagabonds who betook themselves to the calling came soon to take on the form and organisation of a regular staff.

Unfortunately the characters of the leaders, with the exception of Monro, were not calculated to temper this zeal with discretion, or throw a veil of decency over the transactions of low men, which, however justified, as many said, by the necessities of science, were hostile to the instincts of nature, and fearfully resented by the feelings of relatives. Liston was accused, whether justly or not, of wiling patients from the Infirmary, to set off by his brilliant operations the imperfections of the regular surgeons of that institution; and great as he was in his profession, it is certain that he wanted that simplicity and dignity of character necessary to secure to him respect in proportion to the admiration due to his powers. But Knox was a man of a far more complex organisation, if it was indeed possible to analyse him. A despair to the physiognomist who contemplated his rough irregular countenance, with a blind eye resembling a grape, he was not less a difficulty to the psychologist. There seemed to be no principle whereby you could think of binding him down to a line of duty, and a universal sneer, not limited to mundane powers, formed the contrast to an imputed self-perfection, not without the evidence of very great scientific accomplishments. Even before he took up Barclay’s class he was damaged by a story which went the round of the public, and was brought up against him at the time of his great occultation.

On returning from the Cape, where he had been attached as surgeon to a regiment, he was one day met by his old teacher, Professor Jameson, who, after a kindly recognition in his own simple way, inquired what had been his pursuits when abroad.

“Why,” replied Knox, with one of these expressions of an almost unreadable face—something between a leer and overdone sincerity—“why, I was busy in your way,—keen in the study of natural history. No place in the world excels the Cape for curious objects in that department; will you believe it, Professor, I have made an extraordinary discovery?”

“Discovery! ah, you interest me.”

“And well I may,” he continued, as the light of the one orb expressed the new-born zeal of the naturalist. “I have found a new species of animal. Yes, sir, altogether new, and at a world’s-wide distance from any congeners with which you are acquainted—quite an irreproducible phœnix.”

“Then we must identify it with your name,—some adjective connected with night, but not darkness.”

“And that I have done, too,” continued the naturalist.

“Why, then, the description will form an excellent article for our journal. I could wish that you write it out and send it to me. It will be something grand, to shew the Southerners we are en avant.”

“I will do it,” was the reply; “and you shall have it for the next number.”

Nor was Knox worse in this instance than his word, if he could be, for by and by there came to the Professor a spirited, if not elaborate description of the new species, which, having been approved of by the simple Professor, flared brilliantly among the heavy articles of his beloved work. But unhappily for the discoverer, no less than for the editor, the article fell under the eye of Dr Buckland, who soon found out the whole affair to be an excellent hoax. Often afterwards Jameson looked for his contributor to administer a reproof in his gentle way, but this opportunity never awaited him, for Knox, though with one eye, had a long sight when there was danger ahead, and the Professor in the distance sent him down the nearest close with even more than his usual celerity.

Those who knew the man would have no hesitation in placing such an example of his recklessness to the credit of his rampant egotism,[2] certainly not to that of practical joking, a species of devil’s humour not always dissociated from a bonhommie to which the earnest mind of the man was a stranger. Even the bitterness of soul towards competitors was not sufficiently gratified by the pouring forth of the toffana-spirit of his sarcasm. He behoved to hold the phial with refined fingers, and rub the liquid into the “raw” with the soft touch of love. The affected attenuation of voice and forced retinu of feeling, sometimes degenerating into a puppy’s simper, bore such a contrast to the acerbity of the matter, that the effect, though often ludicrous, was increased tenfold. We may now read such a passage as we subjoin,[3] serving merely as a solitary example of the style; but it would be vain to try to estimate the effect from the mere allocation of vocables disjoined from the acrimony they collected in their passage through the ear and carried to the brain.

The Young Amateurs

It would seem that conspiring circumstances at the time pointed to that kind of denouement which is the issue of an evil too great for society to bear. In Barclay’s time, the increased demand for the physical material of the dissecting halls was supplied by a most convenient arrangement of places. There was the Infirmary a little to the west, where deaths were occurring several times a week, and many bodies left unclaimed by their friends. Then, at the back of Barclay’s hall was a little “death’s mailing” set apart for those who had been relieved of life in that refuge of the wretched, and, strangely enough, the windows looked out upon the tempting field; so that a man or woman, dreaming of no such fate, might die and be buried, and taken and dissected, all within the temporal space of a few days, and the physical of a few yards. No great wonder that there was there a rope-ladder of ominous intention, and a box with such accommodating appurtenances as would permit of the insertion of hooks at the end of lines, whereby it might be let down empty and light, and brought up full and heavy. Nor was it inappropriate that young Cullen, the grandson of Celeberrimus, should be the man who accomplished with greatest spirit these easy appropriations. Some will yet recollect how these young gouls grinned with a satanic pleasure, as they saw the heavy-looking sextons busy with the work which they were so soon to undo, if it was not also more than surmise that these grave men could smile in return, even while they were beating down the green sod, as if it were to remain till the greater resurrection, in place of the smaller.

As connected with the continued spoliation of this unfortunate little Golgotha, a story was current out of which was formed a mock heroic imitation of the 17th book of the “Iliad.” It seemed that an old beggar of the name of Sandy M‘Nab, who used to be known in Edinburgh as a cripple ballad singer, had died of almost pure old age in the Infirmary, and was, in due time, consigned to that rest of which, as a peripatetic minstrel, he had enjoyed so small a portion in this world. Yet how little one knows of the fate to which he may be destined! Who could have supposed that Sandy M‘Nab, about whom nobody cared more than to give him an occasional penny, and who was left to die in an hospital, would become as famous, within a limited space, as Patroclus. It seemed that Cullen and some others had, according to their custom, appropriated the body of the minstrel, so far as to have it safely deposited in the box, and that box carefully placed below the window waiting for the application of the rope, whereby it was to be drawn to the upper regions; but in the meantime, some three or four of Monro’s Trojans, jealous of the Greeks, had got over the wall with the same intention that had fired their opponents. Though the night was dark, with only an occasional glimpse of a shy moon, who got herself veiled every now and then, as if ashamed of those deeds of man enacted under her light, the collegians soon ascertained that their envied minstrel had been exhumed, yea, that that body, which once contained a spirit all but cosmopolitan, was cribbed and confined in Cullen’s insatiable box. The discovery inflamed an original intention of mere body-snatching into an emprise of stratagetic war against their professional foes; and straightway they commenced to remove the box to the other side of the yard, with a view to getting it hoisted over the wall. But the work had scarcely commenced, when the watchful enemy, who, in fact, all the time were busily undoing the rope in the hall above, observed the stratagem below; and issuing forth, some three or four of them, under the influence of something more like chivalry than the stealing of bodies, they commenced an attack upon the intruders, which was met by a stout resistance. The box had been removed to nearly the middle of the yard, and round the sacred centre where lay the dead Patroclus, the battle raged with a fierceness not unworthy of the old and immortal conflict. At one time Sandy was in possession of the Barclayens, at another in that of the Monroites; so that the old quotation, which was subsequently incorporated in heroics, was perhaps never, in all time, so applicable,—“Danai Trojanique cadaver manus commiserunt.” Taken and retaken, and guarded with menaces, the inner contest was, meanwhile, illustrated by hand-to-hand fights over the swelling tumuli, perhaps not less glorious in their small way than many which have involved the fate of a kingdom; and yet the object of the conflict was the body of a wandering beggar. Nor is it known how long this affray might have lasted, if some people in the neighbourhood, having heard the uproar, had not threatened, by getting to the top of the wall, to bring the champions before the authorities. The Monroites fled, and the object of all this contention was left in the hands of those who, by possession, had at least the prior right. The box was hoisted to the rooms amidst the acclamations of the conquerors. “Sic hi alacres cadaver extulerunt e bello.”

The want of this fruitful field behoved afterwards, on the advent of Knox, to be supplied by increased exactions over the country; and hence came a more perfect organisation of a staff, composed of men who, without the excuse of a stimulus for science, were attracted to the work by the bribe of high payments. We have already seen to what extent that bribe reached; and whatever otherwise may be thought of those grim minions of the moon, they had more to stir the low passions of human nature than those older minions on the borders, who, for the sake of living steers, often made dead bodies. Science became the Nemesis of the dearest and most sacred affections; and what may appear strange enough, the students themselves engaged in the work with a feeling, as we have hinted, approaching to chivalry. They were sworn knights of the fair damsel Science, though the rites were those of Melpomene, with the grotesque shapes of those of Thalia. The midnight enterprises had charms for them, but they were death to those feelings of a Christian people, which require to be viewed as a natural and necessary part of a social fabric, to be tampered with only to the ruin of virtue. Among these knights at an earlier period stood Robert Liston, whose hardihood and coolness in such midnight adventures could only be equalled by his subsequent surgical handlings; and like all other vigorous and enthusiastic men, he had the power of enlisting associates, warmed by the fire he himself felt.

A favourite theatre for these dark deeds was the banks of the Forth, along which are to be seen many of those small unprotected graveyards which, attached to villages, are as the shadow of the life that is within them. Yes, grave or merry as the hamlet may be, that shadow is never awanting—often within the sound of the marriage-dance, and refusing to be illumined by the light of man’s earthly happiness. Sometimes in poetics called the gnome that points to eternity, no man can but for a few brief moments of seducing joy keep his eye from the contemplation of it; and, whether he can or not, he must be content to lie within its dark outline. These are common thoughts, which are sometimes condemned as a species of moralising; yet surprise will not the less pass even into vertigo when we think of individuals of the same species reversing rites which even lower instincts shudder to touch. We are always looking for seriousness in nature, and it is long till we are forced to confess that she is continually mocking us.

“Usque adeo, res humanas vis abdita quædam
Obterit et pulchros fasceis sævasque secureis
Proculcare ac LUDIBRIO SIBI HABERE videtur.”

On one occasion our anatomist, having got a companion up to the point of courage, resolved to pay a night-visit to one of these outlying places, where, from information he had gained, there had been deposited an object which had a charm to him other than that of the mere “thing.” The man had died of a disease which the country practitioner had reported to Liston as something which had stimulated his curiosity, but which he could not be permitted by the friends to inquire into in the manner so much desired by doctors. The two knights got themselves arrayed as sailors—with the jacket, the sou’-wester, the unbraced trousers, striped shirt, and all the rest—and getting on board a pinnace, made their way to Cures. They had on arrival some time to pass before the coming of the eery hour when such work as they had on hand could be performed with the least chance of interruption. The night, as the principal performer described it, was as dark as the narrow house whereof they were to deprive the still inhabitant, so that even with the assistance of the doctor’s apprentice, who went along with them, they had the greatest difficulty to discover the limited spot of their operations. But Liston had encountered such difficulties before, and then “what mattered if they should take the wrong one?” for with the exception of the pathological curiosity, as in this case, these children of science had no more scruples of choice. In a trice the game was bagged, as they sometimes described the work, and the boy, getting alarmed, flew off with the necessary injunction of secrecy, which only added to his alarm, as they could plainly perceive by the sounds of his rapid receding steps heard in the stillness of the haunted spot.

But the work there was generally the least difficult of such enterprises, for as yet the people had not throughout the rural districts been roused to the necessity of the night-watch, which afterwards became so common. The danger lay in the conveyance, which in this, as in most other instances, was by the means of a pair of strong shoulders. The burden was accordingly hoisted on Liston’s broad back, and the two, stumbling over the green tumuli, got to the skirts, and away as far as they could from habitations. The field side of a thick hedge was the selected place of deposit until the morning gave them light for achieving the further migrations of the unconscious charge; and then there was to be sought out a place of rest for the two tars, wearied with travelling all day homewards in the north after so long a cruise in the South Sea. Nor was it long before a welcome light proclaimed to Liston, who knew the country, the small wayside inn, in which they would repose during the night. And there, to be sure, they got that easy entrance, if not jolly welcome, so often accorded to this good-hearted set of men. They were soon in harmony with the household, and especially with a “Mary the maid of the inn,” who saw peculiar charms in seamen in general, and in our friend Robert in particular; nor was the admiration all on one side, though Mary’s predilection for his kind was, as matters turned out, to be anything but auspicious to the concealed students. Then the coquetting was helped by a little warm drink, if not a song from the companion about a certain “sheer hulk,” which lay somewhere else than behind the hedge.

All this, be it observed, had taken place by the kitchen fire—an appropriate place for benighted seamen; and it being now considerably beyond twelve, they were about to be shewn their room, when they were suddenly roused by a loud shout outside, the words, “Ship, ahoy!” being more distinctly heard by our quasi tars than they perhaps relished, for, after all, neither of our students, however they might impose upon Mary, felt very comfortable under the apprehension of being scanned by a true son of Neptune.

“That’s my brother Bill,” said the girl, as she ran to open the door; “I fear he has been drinking.”

The door being opened, the “Ship, ahoy” entered; and what was the horror of Liston and his friend when they saw a round, good-humoured sailor staggering under the weight of that identical bag and its contents which they had placed behind the hedge only a very short time before!

“There,” cried the blustering lad, who had clearly enough been drinking, as he threw the heavy load on the kitchen-floor with the something between a squash and thump which might have been expected from the nature of the contents—“there, and if it aint something good, rot them chaps there who stole it.”

“What is it?” said Mary.

“And why should I know? Ask them. Didn’t they put the hulk behind a hedge when I was lying there trying to wear about upon t’other tack? What ho!” he continued, “where did you heave from? But first let’s see what’s the cargo.”

And before the petrified students could bring up a sufficient energy to interfere, Bill’s knife had severed the thick cord which bound the neck of the bag. Then mumbling to himself, “What under the hatches?” he exposed, by rolling down the mouth of the bag, the gray head of a man.

The tar’s speech was choked in a moment, and while the girl uttered a loud scream, and rushed out into the darkness, there stood the brave seaman, whose courage was equal to an indifference in a hurricane of wind or war, with his mouth open, and his eyes fixed in his head, and his arms extended as if waiting for the swing of a rope; all which culminated in a shout of terror as he ran after his sister, and left the field to those who could not by their own arts or exertions have got the command of it. So true is it that man’s extremity is also not only God’s opportunity, but sometimes his own, though against His will and His laws. Not a moment was to be lost. Without binding again the bag, the burden was again upon the back of the now resolute Liston, and without having time to pay for their warm drink, or to remember Mary for her smiles, the adventurers were off on their way to the beach.

Of all the unfortunate places on the banks of the estuary resorted to for these midnight prowlings, no one was more remarkable than that romantic little death’s croft, Rosyth, near to Limekilns. Close upon the seashore, from which it is divided by a rough dike, and with one or two melancholy-enough-looking trees at the back, it forms a prominent object of interest to the pleasure parties in the Forth; nor is it possible for even a very practical person to visit it, when the waves are dashing and brattling against the shore, to be unimpressed with the solitude and the stillness of the inhabitants, amidst the ceaseless sounds of what he might term nature’s threnody sung over the achievements of the grim king. Often resorted to by strangers who love, because they require the stimulus of the poetry of external things, the more, perhaps, because they want the true well-spring of humanity within the heart, it is a favourite resort of the inhabitants of the village, where bereaved ones, chiefly lovers of course, sit and beguile their griefs by listening to these sounds, which they can easily fancy have been heard for so many generations, even by those who lie there, and who have themselves acted the same part. The few old gray head-stones, occasionally dashed by the surf, have their story, which is connected through centuries with the names of the villagers; and such melancholy musers find themselves more easily associated with a line of humble ancestors than can occur in the pedigrees of populous towns. Surely it is impossible that these holy feelings can have a final cause so indifferent to Him who, out of man’s heart, however hardened, “brings the issues of love,” that it can be overlooked, defeated, and mocked by that pride of science of which man makes an idol. The ludibrium referred to by Lucretius is in this instance, at least, of man’s making; and if it is conceded to be necessary that the bodily system should be known, that necessity, which is so far of man’s thought, must be restricted by that other necessity, which is altogether of God’s.

It was not to be supposed that this romantic mailing should escape the observation of our anatomist. Nor did it; and we are specially reminded of the fact by an admission made by Liston himself, that, unpoetical and rough as he was, an incident once occurred here which touched him more than any operation he ever performed. On this occasion he and his friends had made use of a boat specially hired for the purpose—a mode of conveyance which subsequently passed into a custom, before the Limekilns people were roused from their apathy, and became next to frantic under circumstances which left it in doubt whether any one of them, husband, wife, father, mother, or lover, could say that their relations had not been stolen away from their cherished Rosyth. The adventurers studied their time so well that their boat would get alongside of the dike under the shade of night, and they could wile away an hour or two while they watched the opportunity of a descent. They were favoured by that inspissated moonlight, which was enough for their keen eyes, and not less keen hands, and yet might suffice to enable them to escape observation. But just as they were about to land they observed the figure of a young woman sitting near one of the head-stones. The stillness all about enabled them to hear deep sobs, as if the heart had been convulsed, and tried by these efforts to throw off the weight of a deep grief. The story was readable enough even by gouls, but so intent were they on their prey that they felt no response to these offerings of the stricken heart to Him who, for His own purposes, had struck it. The scene continued beyond the endurance of their patience, and science, as usual, murmured against Nature’s decrees; but at length she who was thought an intruder rose, and after some movement of the arms, which came afterwards to be understood, slowly left the spot.

The coast, as the saying goes, was now at last clear, and with a bound the myrmidons overleaped the wall. They were presently on the spot where the female had been seated, and even in their hurry observed that the heart-broken creature had been occupied as her last act by throwing some silly bits of flowers over the grave,—signs which as little physically as morally interfered with their design of spoliation. In a few minutes the object they sought was in their possession, and if there was any care more than ordinary observed in putting all matters to right on the surface, it was the selfish wish to keep so convenient a place free from those suspicions which might bar another visit. Nay, so heartless were they, that one of the party, whether Liston himself we cannot say, though it would not have been unlike him, decorated his jacket by sticking one of the slips of offering into the button-hole. They now hurried with their burden to the boat and pushed off, but they had scarcely got beyond a few yards when they saw the same figure hurrying to the dike. The light of the moon was now brighter, and they could easily observe the figure as it passed hurriedly, as if in great excitement, backwards and forwards, occasionally holding out the arms, and uttering the most melancholy sounds that ever came from the human heart. It might be that as yet she had hope in mere adjuration, but as the boat moved further and further away, there came a shrill wail, so piercing that it might have been heard even at the distance of the village. But heedless of an appeal, which nature responded to faithfully by an echo, they rowed away, still hearing, in spite of the splash of the oars, the same wail as it gradually became faint in their increasing distance. At length they could hear nothing but the sweltering of the waters, and Rosyth with its solitary mourner bade fair to be forgotten under the Lethe of the flask, which on such occasions was never awanting.

This story was very soon made readable to Liston and the others by the concatenation of certain very simple circumstances. A newspaper report which Liston had seen some days before, had announced the death, by drowning, of a young sailor belonging to Limekilns. The account was sufficiently lugubrious for any readers; but the editor, as usual, had mixed up with it, whether truly or not, the old story of love and impending marriage; the object too being, of course, young, brave, virtuous, and comely. Then came the account of the funeral, also touchingly given. But it seemed that all this poetry had been thrown away upon the ardent anatomist; nor even when afterwards, in the hall, he became satisfied that he had secured the right object, would he in his heart admit that he had in this adventure done anything more than would be justified by the use he could make of his knowledge in ameliorating physical evils in his fellow-men, however dearly that advantage might have been acquired in the agony of that figure he had left wailing at Rosyth. Yet it is but fair to say that Liston himself admitted that the sound of that cry, the sight of those wringing hands, and the rapid goings to and fro of the shade on the shore, never passed from his memory.

Robert Liston, beyond all the others, carried so much of the spirit of chivalry into his adventures of body-snatching, that he thought it as noble an act to carry off a corpse as an ancient knight-errant did to bear off a prisoner; but his followers were more like mimallons than myrmidons, and required more of the flask to keep up their spirits. Some of these youths once made a mistake at Rosyth. Having run up their boat, they proceeded to the little death’s croft to take up the body of a woman who had died in child-bed. The night was dark and gusty, and the wind whistled through the long grass as if Nænia had been presiding there to hear her own doleful music; but our youths cared little for these things, and, after twenty minutes’ work, they pulled up “the tall beauty,” as they called her after they got home. Away they hurried her to the dike, upon which they laid her, till two got over to place her in the boat. All seemed fair, but just at the moment, some ill-mannered tyke set up, without the excuse of a moon,—for she was far enough away beyond the shadows,—a deep howl, so prolonged and mournful, that even all the potency of the flask could not save them from being struck with awe, as well as a fear of detection. But they had more to be afraid of, for almost immediately after, one of them called out, “There’s a lantern among the graves;” and thus flurried, yet determined not to lose their prize, they rugged the body from the top of the rubble dike so roughly, if not violently, that a great portion of the long hair, which had got entangled among the stones, was, along with a piece of the scalp, torn away, and left hanging on the other side. Safe on board, they lost no time in pushing off, in spite of the surly breakers that threatened to detain them; nor did they now care for either the dog or the lantern, the latter of which they saw through the dark medium, dodging towards the very spot they had left, and then remain stationary there, as if the bearer had been stayed and petrified by the relic they had left. Up to not a very late period, the story went in the neighbourhood that he who bore the lantern was the husband of “the tall beauty,” and that he discovered the hair, and knew from the colour, which nearly approached flaxen, that it was that of his wife, whose untimely death had rendered him frantic.

There was no loss in that case; but another which was current among the classes not long after was less fortunate, though not less true, as indeed may be verified by the brother, still living, of the young student who figured in it. Somewhere about Gilmerton or Liberton, we are uncertain which, a small farmer who had lost his wife went out one morning very early, probably because he could not rest in his bed for the dreary blank that was there,—that negative so much more appalling to love than the dead positive. On going along the Edinburgh road, he observed some white figure lying close by the footpath, and making up to see what it was, he came upon the corpse of a woman, dressed in her scolloped dead-clothes, and lying extended upon her back, with the “starr eyes” open, glazed, and fixed. On looking more narrowly, he discovered that it was his own wife, and, all dismayed and wild as he became, he could still have the power to think that she had come back to life after having been buried and lain in the grave for three days, and had thus far struggled to get to her beloved home. Frenzy knows nothing of logic, and was he to think how she could have thrown off a ton of earth and got up again to the light of the sun? The idea took him by force, and, throwing himself upon the body, he looked into the dead orbs, and watched the cold stiff lips, and listened for a breath. Vain heart, with all its hopes and tumults! no sign in return for all this madness. Yet he persevered, and gave up, and resumed, and, as the hope died to come back again, he writhed his strong body in an agony tenfold more acute than his first grief; nor would he in all probability have renounced the insane hope for a much longer time, if the Penicuik carrier had not come up, and, hearing the wonderful tale, hinted the explanation of an interrupted body-snatching. The light flashed upon him in an instant, and, in pursuance of a desire to keep the occurrence secret for the sake of her friends, he prevailed upon the man to take the body in the cart and remove it to his house. It was buried again privately on the following night, and few ever heard of the occurrence. And now comes the explanation of a story which may seem altogether incredible. A young student of the name of F——y, belonging to Monro’s class, entered with two others into an adventure of body-snatching, in imitation of those whose exploits had produced in them an enthusiasm untempered by prudence, and not directed by experience. They fixed upon their ground, and hired a gig, and the hour was regulated by an obituary. Away accordingly they set, with no more knowledge of the secrets of the art than what they could get from the regular purveyors of the class, but provided with the necessary instrument. They soon got to their destination, and, leaving the gig in the charge of one of them, the two others got over the low wall, and, by the aid of the moon, discovered the last laid turf. Going to work vigorously, they succeeded in raising the body of a woman, but not having brought from the gig the indispensable sack, and, being fluttered and hurried, they bethought themselves of carrying the object to the side of the road, just as it was with the dead-clothes, and then running along by the side of the hedge to where their companion waited. F——y accordingly, with the aid of his friend, got the white burden hoisted on his back, holding it as firmly as he could by the linen. So far all was well, and they were fortunate, moreover, in getting out by a gate which they could open; but just as F——y got to the road, along which he had to go a considerable space, the grasp he had of the shroud began to give way, perhaps almost unknown to himself, the effect of which was that the body slipped so far down that the feet touched the ground. The consequence was altogether peculiar; as F——y bent and dodged in the hurry of getting forward, the feet of the corpse, coming always to the ground, resiled again with something like elasticity, so that it appeared to him as if it trotted or leaped behind him. Fear is the mother of suspicion, and the idea took hold of him that the body was alive. He uttered a roar,—threw his burden off, and crying out to his friend, “By G——, she’s alive!” jumped into the gig. His friend was taken by the same terror, and away they galloped, leaving the corpse in the place where it was found next morning by the husband.

The Regular Staff.

It is, we think, laid down in that strange book of Robert Forsyth’s on morals, that the gratification of the desire of knowledge is, at least on this earth of ours, the true end of man; and, no doubt, were we to judge of the strength of this desire in forcing man down into the bowels of the earth, and up into the heavens, across unknown seas, and over equally unknown continents, we would not be slow to confess its great power. And yet how many there are who assign the same place to the power of mammon, while others stand up for love and the social affections! We will not presume to decide where the range goes from the things of earth to those of heaven; but it appears pretty certain that there have been a good many Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpes, who have lauded, while in health, the practice of leaving the body to the doctors, and who yet have shrunk from the personal example when the shadow of the dark angel was over them. There have been also, we suspect, fewer Jeremy Benthams, who actually have left their carrion to the vultures of science, than of Merryleeses, who have robbed churchyards, and sold the stolen article for money.[4] Nor, in estimating the motives of the few scientific testators, can we say that we have much belief in their professions, if it is not more true that they are only seekers of notoriety, sometimes, as in the case of the author of the Fallacies, so weak as to be bribed by the offer of having their skins tanned and distributed in slips—the skin being, in such instances, the most valuable part of their corporations.

In pursuance of these notions, we may safely infer that if the wants of the halls had been left to be supplied by the scientific zeal of the amateurs, the state of anatomy would have been less perfect than we find it under the auspices of such men as Schwann, or Bell, or Hall, in our day. And we say this without being much satisfied that all the boasted discoveries have led to much more than the conviction that we get deeper and deeper into the dark, while—admitting many ameliorations—the people recover from operations, or die of diseases, very much as they used to do. What are called the high cases might very well be left alone, so that we might be still bound to admit that Nature’s purpose, in imposing the sacred feeling for the dead, is consistent with her determination, that if in this defeated by man, he shall earn nothing by trying to get at her secrets. But there was no necessity that the matter of purveyance should be left to the students. There have always been body-thieves; but the time had come in Scotland, when not only their number behoved to be increased, but their energies also, by the multiplied demands of the halls.

How far this increase might have progressed, but for the great drama of “The Scotch Court of Cacus,” it is impossible to say; but for a time the staff of Knox’s artists were rather put upon their wits and exertions, than increased by dangerous bunglers. The trade was perilous, and required attributes not very often found united,—a total bluntness of feeling, a certain amount of low courage, much ingenuity of device, clever personal handling, and total disregard of public opinion—the love of money being the governing stimulant. Few classes of men could have afforded a better study in the lower and grosser parts of human nature. There was one called Merrylees, or more often Merry-Andrew, a great favourite with the students. Of gigantic height, he was thin and gaunt, even to ridiculousness, with a long pale face, and the jaws of an ogre. His shabby clothes, no doubt made for some tall person of proportionate girth, hung upon his sharp joints, more as if they had been placed there to dry than to clothe and keep warm. Nor less grotesque were the motions and gestures of this strange being. It seemed as if he went upon springs, and even the muscles of his face, as they passed from the grin of idiot pleasure to the scowl of anger, seemed to obey a similar power. Every movement was a spasm, as if the long lank muscles, unable to effect a contraction through such a length, accomplished their object by the concentrated energy of violent snatches. So, too, with the moral part: the normal but grotesque gravity was only to be disturbed by some sudden access of passion, which made him toss his arms and gesticulate. So completely was he the cause of fun in others, that often on the street some larking student would cry out, “Merry-Andrew,” for no other purpose than to see him wheel about, clench his hands, and throw his face into all manner of furious contortions. All this only conspired to make him a butt, and the loud laugh which always came when there was nothing to laugh at, or rather something which would have produced gravity in another, helped the consummation.

Yet withal this same idiot was the king of Knox’s artists. Nothing dared him, and nothing shamed him, if he was not even proud of a profession which was patronised by gentlemen and men of science, and paid at a rate which might have put industrious and honest tradesmen to the blush. Like many other half simpletons, too, he had a fertility of device in attaining his object, which insured success, when others apparently more intelligent despaired. So he was a leader upon whom often depended the hopes of the students, when their material was scarce or awanting. When not engaged in his rural exploits, he was always hanging about the Infirmary, where, no doubt, he was in secret communication with the élèves of that institution connected with Knox’s rooms. From these he got intelligence of likely deaths, where there was a chance of the persons not being soon claimed by their relatives. Now was the opportunity of this genius. He kept a brown black suit for the occasion of a mourner, repaired to the Infirmary, and acted the part of the relative to such perfection, that the nurses at least—for the medical men could wink—were deceived. Nay, he looked at all times so much the afflicted, that the personation even to something like tears was as easy to him as to the weeper in the House of Commons, who cried “like a crocodile with his hands in his breeches’ pockets.” The moment the body was got outside in the white coffin, the bearers actually ran with it to the hall, under the inspiration of the, to such glandered hacks in the shape of men, so enormous a reward.

Another of the leaders, though far inferior to Merrylees, was the “Spune,” a name given to a man whose real one was scarcely known in the rooms, and which was supposed to indicate some superior genius in lifting out the contents of a coffin. He was a littleish man, with a clean-shaved face, surmounting a dirty black suit, worn down to the cotton, which time had glazed. One would have taken him not certainly for a remunerated Methodist preacher, but one who would have given a great amount of doctrine for as much as would have got him a dinner. Yet he was in reality a mute, being one of those dumb worshippers of philosophy whose thoughts, going down into the earth, if not up to heaven, are too deep and sacred for human speech. Nay, so grave, precise, and wise did he look, that you would have said he bore all the honours of the science to the advancement of which he contributed so much; nor is it certain that he did not really feel—so necessary if not indispensable they considered themselves to be to the professors—that he was engaged in the holy cause of the advancement of mankind and the amelioration of their natural ills,—a conviction this, on the part of the “Spune,” not modified by the reception of his fee, which he considered to be the wages of virtue; for while Merry-Andrew clutched his reward with a spasm and a spring, his compeer took his with the dignity and nonchalance of one who laboured for the benefit of his species. However ludicrous all this, one could scarcely say that it was out of place, for without the “Spune” the indagators in the hall would have had small chance of extracting anything from that deep well where it is said truth can alone be found.

Another was a man whose real name was Mowatt, but who was christened by the professional appellation of “Moudewart,” (moldewarp,) sufficiently indicative of his calling in burrowing into the bowels of the earth. An old plasterer, too lazy to work, he had betaken himself to this trade from a mere love of the money, so that he behoved to rank in a much lower grade than the “Spune.” Then, so essentially insensible was he to the honour of contributing to science, that he did not take on a particle of dignity, even from the sympathy of his fellow-labourers. It might be in vain that the “Spune” tried to impress him with the importance of his calling,—he was a man of merely so many pounds for what is in the bag, and no more. Without that principle of receptivity which enables a congenial soul to take on the reflection of the beauty or honour of an act, he was equally dead to the sublime inspiration of knowledge. Even Merry-Andrew had collected some scientific terms—such as caput, or cranium, sometimes even attempting occiput—all parts of the body with which alone he had anything to do in the process of abstraction; and as for the “Spune,” he could even discourse of tibias and fibulas, if he did not stagger under os coccygis, in a manner which might have made his companion prick up his ear at the wonder that any such head could carry such terms. But what can be done with a man who has no symptoms of a human soul but that which shews itself when the eye counts with something like pleasure the price of a human body? Yet, strange enough, and perhaps unjustly enough, the two others were not more prized by their patrons than this degraded son of science, who served their purpose equally well—a fact which would have brought down the learned dignity of his co-labourers if they had had sense enough to notice it.

The others of the staff (the names of some of whom we could give) were not to be compared to these leaders—not even to the “Moudiewart,” who, however stupid in respect to the science, was really sufficiently up to “the thing” to entitle him to rank as a successful if not respectable merchant. They were so utterly insensate, that they could not even commit the great mistake of supposing that their occupation degraded them, for the good reason that they were unconscious of degradation. Not that they were unhappy in consequence of not liking the work, for they were even fond of it as a means of getting them drink and tobacco, without the hope of which they might have been dull or sad, but not unhappy, a term which implies something like intelligence, if not sentiment. Fitted only for the humblest parts of the calling—the carrying, the watching, the calling out when intruders loomed in the distance—they had no envy towards the higher orders, and being thus free from all care, they could sing or whistle beneath the burden of a poet without thinking that they desecrated the profession of the Muses. We might thus liken them to those interlusive gentry who play the punning parts of a terribly deep tragedy, and who, not knowing where the pathos lies, as when Hamlet discourses on the skull, are contented with the duty of shovelling out either soil or song.

If we were inclined to moralise a little on the condition of such men as these, if men they can be called, we would hesitate to subscribe to the old Johnsonian notion that happiness has any relation to the number of ideas that pass through the mind, if we would not go to the other extreme, that for aught we know, there may be as much of that kind of thing between the shells of an oyster as between the ribs of a human being—at least the question must remain unsettled until we come again in the round of changes to the doctrine of transmigration of souls. The world is full of the examples of the meeting of extremes; and if you want one more, just take that afforded by the fact that these men we have been describing could carry on their shoulders in a canvas bag a Rothschild or a Byron, and never think that they were to any degree honoured by the burden. All one to them—the beautiful young creature who died of a scorned affection, the shrivelled miser who expired in a clutch of his gold, or the old gaberlunzie whose puckered lungs could no longer inflate themselves or the bagpipes which once received so joyfully the superabundant wind. But seriously, although these things have been, are we entitled to go with the fatalist, who says that what is, is as it ought to be? Though the wily fox contrived to get his neighbours to cut off their tails to make them like himself in his misfortune of being excaudated, is that any reason why nature should repeal her law and produce therefore tailless foxes? We hope not. And so also, because science run mad decreed that she should be served by such men and such acts, in opposition to the first and last throbbings of the love of kindred, is that any reason why nature should renounce her right of forming man in the image of God, and with affections which are to endure through all eternity? But we have even now, when it is whispered that subjects are again becoming scarce, men of the Christian faith who speak lightly of the dead human frame as nothing when deprived of the spirit. This may do for the logic of physics, but we have been led to believe that the religion we profess is not that of Merry-Andrew or the “Spune,” but a divine intimation that the temple of the soul is not limited to the time of the earth—yea, that it is something which, only changed, shall rise again and endure for ever. Even this is not adverse to the claims of science; but as a shade distinguishes homicide and murder, so does a shade distinguish between science in reverence to God, and science in desecration of His first and most universal laws.

Sympathising Sextons, Doctors, and Relatives.

All forces are measured by opposition, as, indeed, all the phenomena of nature are known to us by comparison, and so, in all fairness, we must estimate the turpitude of the professors and students the more lightly, in proportion to their freedom from all endearing feelings of recognition or friendship towards those whose remains came within their studies. The same metre is due to the class of purveyors, and Heaven knows how much, after all this abatement, remained at their debit, cognisant as they behoved to be of the certainty that they were sowing the bitter seeds of misery throughout the land. But what are we to say of others—doctors in the country who were privy to the remunerated exhumation of their patients—sextons who gave the pregnant hint, and then went to sleep in the expectation of a fee in the morning—nay, of those, and such at that time were counted among human beings, who bartered their friends and relatives for a smile of mammon?

Out of these materials how easy could it be to add so much, and so many more darker shades to the picture. We have no great wish to lay them on either thick or thin—the mind will paint for itself, as rises the contemplation: the family doctor hanging over his patient with professional sympathy, and perhaps something finer, dreaming the while of a post-obit fee, in addition to that paid for his skill to cure—the sexton clapping down the sod over a companion who had often set the table in a roar, in which the grave official had joined, and meditating a resurrection through his means in the morning—the relative who had even got the length of tears, dropping them on the pale face of an old friend, all the while that he meditated a sale of the body. But it is true that the annals of the period justified all these grim pictures. Many will still recollect the young Irish doctor who went in the Square under the name of the “Captain”—a man of such infinite spirits, always in a flow of his country’s humour, that you could not suppose that there was time or room in his mind for a little smooth pool to reflect a passing cloud of sadness. In his native town he drove a great trade for the Edinburgh halls—his largest contribution being laid on the graveyard of his native town. And surely, in his case, we would have thought the Chinese system of paying a doctor, only in the case of recovery, would have been an example of Irish prudence. Nay, so many were the barrels, with a peculiar species of contenu, he sent by Leith, that it was difficult to avoid the suspicion that the rollicking son of Erin had a faith in his medicines stronger than the hope which illumined the faces of his patients. These barrels of the “Captain” were quite well known, not only to the skippers, but the porters about the pier, ay, even the carters who made the final transport; and here, again, mammon was the seducing spirit. It was only when he came over for his large accumulated payments that he was seen in the hall, where his jokes and immeasurable laughter might have made those quiet heads on the tables rise to get a look of their once sympathising surgeon. Nor, in the consideration of the students, was his laughter unjustified by his jokes; as once where, pointing to a certain table, he apostrophised the burden it carried—“Ah, Misthress O’Neil! did I spare the whisky on you, which you loved so well,—and didn’t you lave me a purty little sum to keep the resurrectionists away from you,—and didn’t I take care of you myself? and by J——s you are there, and don’t thank me for coming over to see you;” or when, in the same brogue, he told them that, not long before his coming over, he had, for lack of “the thing” in his own town, taken a car and rode to a neighbouring village, where he got precisely what he wanted; that, on returning at a rapid rate with his charge, he met the mother of it with the words in her mouth—

“Well, docther, is it all right wid the grave ov poor Pat?”

“All right, misthress. Didn’t I tell you afore there were no resurrectionists in that quarter?”

“And you are sure you eximined it complately?”

“No doubt in the wide earth.”

“Then I may go back, and you’ll give me a ride?”

“Surely, and plaisant,” said he; “just get up.”

“And,” continued the Captain to the delighted students, “I dhrove the good lady home agin without breaking a bone of her body, and Pat never said a word.”

“But,” he went on, “if I were to tell you all my Irish work, I would never get back to my ould country agin.”

“Just another adventure, Captain.”

“Well, then, didn’t a purty young girl—and I have hopes of her yet for myself, for she has money galore—come to me one day in a mighty fit of grief?”

“‘My poor mother has been rizzt,’ said she, as she burst out in the way of these gentle craturs.

“‘And she has not,’ said I—(the more by token that I had the ould lady in the house.)

“‘I have been at the grave,’ said she, ‘and I see it has been disturbed.’

“‘And it has not,’ said I; ‘for wasn’t I there this morning before ever a soul in all the town was stirring? and didn’t I leave it all right with my ould friend?’

“‘But I have seen marks,’ said she again; for she was so determined.

“‘And do you think I don’t know you have?’ said I; ‘and didn’t I see them, after I got a spade from the sexton and put on a nate sod or two more to make the grave dacent and respectable?’

“‘Oh, I’m so glad,’ replied she, all of a content.

“‘And you’ll be gladder yet, my darling,’ said I, as I gave her a kiss. ‘Go home and contint yourself, and perhaps, when your mournings are off, you may consent to make a poor docther happy.’

“And so she went away, blushing as no one ever saw except in a raal rose.”

And the laugh again sounded through the hall among the dead.

Whether these stories were true, or merely got up by the extravagant love of fun in the Captain, it would not be easy to say; but certain it is, that their being told and responded to in the manner thus described, from the lips of an ear-witness, shews us the atmosphere of moral feeling that then obtained in places proudly designated as being dedicated to the interests of humanity, and from which, too, we could draw the conclusion that what was gained in the amelioration of physical disease was required to be debited so largely with the deterioration of morals and a wide-spread infliction of pain. But even darker deeds were done in Scotland than those for which the Captain took so gasconading a credit. From a certain village called S——e, the myrmidons of the Square, and particularly the “Spune,” got more material for the Hall than could have been expected without a resident sympathiser and participator in the profits. That zealous correspondent was not the sexton—no, nor the minister; but he was the minister’s brother, and, so far as we can learn, a member of the profession. Need it be remarked how convenient the relation between the messenger of heaven and the benefactor of earth—the physician of souls and the curer of bodies—the man of prayers and the man of pills—the distributor of the great catholicon and the dispenser of the small! We can fancy the godly man, we believe all unconscious of the intentions of his brother, pouring the holy unction of his prayers over the struggling spirit of the dying Christian, and the doctor counting the pulses as they died away into that stillness which was to be the prelude to the payment—five pounds—for the deserted temple. One recording angel would fly to heaven with a name to be inscribed in the roll of eternal salvation, and the other to Edinburgh to announce that another body was to be inserted in the black list of Surgeon’s Square.

Even this was not the culmination of the evil. The head of the scorpion—society—was to swallow its tail, so that the virtue and the poison would meet and traverse together the circle. Mammon, through the medium of the leaders of the purveyors of science, extended his charm to the hearts of relations and friends, changing the soft glance of love and pity into the fiery glare of sordid rapacity. Throughout the High Street and Canongate, and down through the squalid wynds and closes, where, though crime and misery shake hands over the bottle of whisky, the death-bed still retains some claims over the affections, and where religion is sometimes able to extort from the demons of passion the unwilling tribute of compunction, these strange men prowled in the hope of finding or making a monster. And in this it is certain that they succeeded more often than was then suspected, or is even yet known. Their first inquiry was for death-beds, and the next for evidence of squalid poverty combined with vice. The subject was approached cautiously where the ground had all the appearance of being dangerous. If they were met by deliberation or hesitation, between which and blows there was no space, their object was secured, as the devil’s is, by exposing to the haggard eye of penury the very form and substance of the bribe. In one case, reported by Merrylees himself, the bargain was struck in a whisper by the bed-side of the dying friend. How far the relationship extended in any of these cases we never could ascertain; and it is only fair to assume, for the sake of human nature, that in the majority of instances the success was only over the keepers of stray lodgers, and mere friends, as distinguished from relatives; but that there were, some where there behoved to be the yearnings of affection, and a consequent struggle between love and mammon, there can be no doubt.

Thus, however difficult or delicate the moral impediments that required to be overcome, the physical parts of the contract were of easy management. The coffining was made a little ceremony, performed in presence of some of the neighbours. There would be tears, no doubt, if not an Irish howl, and the louder perhaps the greater the bribe; and in the evening a bag of tanners’ bark supplied the place of the friend of the many virtues discoursed of at the wake. Nor was there less care taken in carrying this box of bark to the Canongate burying-ground than was displayed by “Merry-Andrew” in conveying the surrogatum to Surgeon’s Square; but, of course, there would be a difference in the speed of the respective bearers. Taking all these details into account, we can scarcely deny that these men wrought harder for their money than if they had pursued a regular calling. But, then, they liked it. Even after the bargain for the living invalid was struck, how many anxious watchings at a wynd-end were to exhaust the weary hours before the spirit took wing from the sold body! The gaunt figure of Merrylees, as he jerked his lank muscles and threw his face into the old contortions, might be seen there, but none would know what this meant.

One night, a student who saw him standing at a close-end, and suspected that his friend was watching his prey, whispered in his ear, “She’s dead,” and, aided by the darkness, escaped. In a moment after, “Merry-Andrew” shot down the wynd, and, opening the door, pushed his lugubrious face into a house.

“It’s a’ owre I hear,” said he, in a loud whisper; “and when will we come for the body?”

“Whisht, ye mongrel,” replied the old harridan who acted as nurse; “she’s as lively as a cricket.”

A statement which, though whispered in the unction of secresy, and with most evident sincerity, Merrylees doubted, under a suspicion that the woman’s conscience had come between her and the love of money; and, jerking himself forward to the bed, he threw the shadow of his revolting countenance over the face of the terrified invalid, enough of itself to have sent the hovering spirit to its destination, whether above or below. Not a word was spoken by the victim. She had heard enough to rouse terror sufficient to deprive her of speech, if not of breath; and all that the ogre witnessed was the pair of eyes lighted up with the parting rays of the fluttering spirit, and peering mysteriously as if into his very soul.

But then, as it happened, “Merry-Andrew” had only a body, and this look, more like as it was to a phosphoric gleam than the light of the living spirit, fell blank. Enough for him that she was not yet dead; and, taking one of his springing steps, he was out of the room, forcing his way up the wynd, to seek, and, if possible, to wreak a most imprudent vengeance on the larking prig who had put his long muscles to such unfruitful exercise. Meanwhile, the young rogue had waited for the butt, to see some more of his picturesque spasms; nor was he disappointed, for the moment Merrylees cast his eye on him, he tossed up his hands, and, with a shout which might have been taken by one who did not know him, or even by one who did, as an indication either of intense fun or fiery anger, made after him at the rate of his long strides. The student, of course, escaped, and Merrylees, convinced that the invalid was not so near her end as he wished, went growling home to bed.

But this tragedy, with its ephialtic forms reflecting these coruscations of grim comedy, did not end here. The old invalid, no doubt hastened by what she had witnessed, died on the following night; and on that after the next succeeding, when he had reason to expect that she would be conveniently placed in that white fir receptacle that has a shape so peculiarly its own, and not deemed by him so artistic as that of a bag or a box, Merrylees, accompanied by the “Spune,” entered the dead room with the sackful of bark. To their astonishment, and what Merrylees even called disgusting to an honourable mind, the old wretch had scruples.

“A light has come doon upon me frae heaven,” she said, “and I canna.”

“Light frae heaven!” said Merrylees indignantly. “Will that shew the doctors how to cut a cancer out o’ ye, ye auld fule? But we’ll sune put out that light,” he whispered to his companion. “Awa’ and bring in a half-mutchkin.”

“Ay,” replied the “Spune,” as he got hold of a bottle, “we are only obeying the will o’ God. ‘Man’s infirmities shall verily be cured by the light o’ His wisdom.’ I forget the text.”

And the “Spune,” proud of his biblical learning, went upon his mission. He was back in a few minutes; for where in Scotland is whisky not easily got?

Then Merrylees, (as he used to tell the story to some of the students, to which we cannot be expected to be strictly true as regards every act or word,) filling out a glass, handed it to the wavering witch.

“Tak’ ye that,” he said, “and it will drive the deevil out o’ ye.”

And finding that she easily complied, he filled out another, which went in the same direction with no less relish.

“And noo,” said he, as he saw her scruples melting in the liquid fire, and took out a pound-note, which he held between her face and the candle, “look through that, ye auld deevil, and ye’ll see some o’ the real light o’ heaven that will mak’ your cats’ een reel.”

“But that’s only ane,” said the now-wavering merchant, “and ye ken ye promised three.”

“And here they are,” replied he, as he held before her the money to the amount of which she had only had an experience in her dreams, and which reduced her staggering reason to a vestige.

“Weel,” she at length said, “ye may tak’ her.”

And all things thus bade fair for the completion of the barter, when the men, and scarcely less the woman, were startled by a knock at the door, which having been opened, to the dismay of the purchasers there entered a person, dressed in a loose great-coat, with a broad bonnet on his head, and a thick cravat round his throat, so broad as to conceal a part of his face.

“Mrs Wilson is dead?” said the stranger, as he approached the bed.

“Ay,” replied the woman, from whom even the whisky could not keep off an ague of fear.

“I am her nephew,” continued the stranger, “and I am come to pay the last duties of affection to one who was kind to me when I was a boy. Can I see her?”

“Ay,” said the woman; “she’s no screwed doon yet.”

Enough for “Merry-Andrew” and the “Spune.” They were off, and up the wynd in a moment, followed by the stranger, who, for some reason that has not in the story yet appeared, gave them chase, only so much as to terrify them into a flight, but without being carried so far as to insure a seizure, which he did not seem inclined to achieve. Nor did he return to bury Mrs Wilson—a strange mystery to the unnatural nurse, who, however, did not lose all, for the three pounds had been left on the table, and were quickly appropriated without the least consideration.

The story next day went the round of the hall; and it was not until the woman was buried, that Merrylees and his friend were made aware that the same student who had played the principal performer at the head of the wynd was the stranger in a very well-assorted disguise.

Preying on each other

We are surprised when we find a man turn wicked all of a sudden, and seldom think that we are simply drawing a false conclusion, insomuch as the suddenness of the supposed change is a mere jump of development,—the consequence of a long train, dating perhaps from infancy. So true is it, that the increase of depravity is the progression of degrees, all according to that law of nature whereby God wills to act by the regular process of cause and effect, each change helping another, till matters come to a burst, when the often-split powers take new directions, to begin in new courses, and go on increasing as before. We have already seen the demon mammon obeying the law of increased power, spreading from a centre in Surgeon’s Square among the people, and trying heart after heart, even to that core where he battled successfully with affections which God seems to have consecrated to Himself. Yes; and the demon was to go farther and farther,—even beyond the stage where we are sure to find him,—contesting even the breasts of the regular traders, the very centres of their natural affinities.

We have already noticed the use to which “Merry-Andrew” put that brown-black suit of his, the white neckcloth, the haggard cheeks, and the tears,—all so often the stage property in the melodrama of life, and as easily put off as the personation of the character, unless kept on by the adhesive effect of a good legacy. But as every man is once or twice in his life doomed to experience in reality that which he falsifies in theory, so our mourner over those he had never seen before was on one occasion, at least, placed in a position where it might have been expected he would experience something like a qualm about the thing which was in form, if not in consistency, a heart. It seems that Merrylees had a sister in Penicuik, with whom he had been brought up, and towards whom, before he had experienced the hardening process of mammon’s manipulations, he had entertained something like affection. That sister happened to die; and, on a certain day, Merrylees appeared in the Square once more in the old suit which had so faithfully repaid its original cost twenty times over. He had sense enough—and the reason thereof may appear, on a little consideration of the character of his compeers—to keep the circumstance of the death to himself; and, accordingly, when the apparition appeared in the ominous suit, they anticipated another descent of grief upon the Infirmary.

This suspicion very soon passed away, for not only was there no sign of that puckering up of the lank muscles, not deserving the name of a look of vivacity, which preceded his lugubrious personation in the hospital, but the day passed without any aid being asked from the others to help to carry, or rather run, with the white coffin. The methodist “Spune” was the first to divine the real cause of the chief’s melancholy; and whether it was, as was said,—for we are not certain of the fact,—that the two had had a quarrel some time before about the division of spoil, it was certain that the worsted competitor began to entertain some very dark thoughts about a visit to Penicuik church-yard, whereby he could not only remunerate himself in the shape of money, but achieve one of the most curious revenges that ever were enjoyed since Nemesis began to have her fiery eyes. So, taking Mowat to a side of the Square, the “Spune” began to look mysteriously into his face—a most unnecessary process, where there never was any change of expression since first nature squeezed the clay into solidity.

“I suspect Merrylees’ sister’s dead at last,” said he; “isn’t she as good as another?”

“Nae difference,” was the answer, without any surprise.

“Yes, ye fule, some; and you’re so stupid you don’t see it.”

“I can see nane,—a’ is alike to me; ae worm’s as gude’s anither to the ‘Moudiewart.’”

“Ay, but if a worm had bitten ye, man, wouldn’t you squeeze it the harder?”

“Maybe.”

“And have you forgotten the ten shillings in Blackfriars’ Wynd?”

“I’ll tak it oot o’ his blude,” was the surly reply.

“And why not out of his sister’s?” said the “Spune,” with another dark look as unnecessary as the former.

“Just as sune,—a’ ane.”

“And,” continued the tempter, where no temptation was necessary, “I know where she lies, just in the southeast angle, where he told me his father was laid.”

“Why no him?” replied Mowat; “a’ ane.”

“Rotten ten years ago, you idiot,” said the other, getting impatient.

“Weel, the fresh ane then.”

“Now you are sensible,” continued the friendly counsellor; “we might have her here in the morning, with five pounds each in our pockets, and a laugh in our sleeves at Merrylees.”

“I never saw you laugh,” said Mowat, in perfect innocence.

“No more you did, nor any other person, ’cause its always in the sleeve. Doesn’t do to laugh about these things—they’re scientific.”

“Umph! dinna understand that; but I’m ready when you like.”

“That’s right,” replied the gratified “Spune.” “Have Cameron’s donkey and cart at the south end of Newington by ten o’clock. It’s moonlight, I think.”

“Dinna ken, but it’s a’ ane. I’ll be there; but, mind, you stand the whisky this time.”

And so (having indulged, perhaps, in our own way of putting this conversation—the contenu being the same) the important enterprise was arranged with that zest on the part of the grave and precise principal which results from secrecy; for it was impossible to suppose that Merrylees could suspect that even they were capable of preying on their fellow-labourer, and robbing the nest of any affections that might hang about it.

At the appointed time the “Moudiewart” was at his post with the little cuddy and the cart, where he was soon joined by his friend. Away they went,—Mowat driving, and the “Spune” lying extended in the vehicle, in utter disregard of the poor animal, not much larger than himself. With such an object before them, comprehending within the success of its acquisition the gratification of two of the strongest passions of degraded man, and no sensibility to admit of the feeling of a reaction in the quietness of the road and the increasing stillness of the hour, with, in addition, an auspicious moon, in whose face they could look only as a light-giving thing that makes gnomes out of head-stones, they might have been supposed to be merry. But no, there were no salient points in their natures from which could spring even that mirth which rides on the back of horrors. Mutely they drove along, with no sounds to break the silence, save the patter of the donkey’s feet and the turns of the wheels. Very different this silent progress from those expeditions in which Merrylees formed a part, and where, if there was necessarily absent everything like the rational discourse of human beings, there was yet something to relieve the monotony in the shout after draining off a glass, the muscular contortions, and the bizarres étourderies of their strange friend. It was the caravan without the fool, and even he, as a son of Momus and Angerona, or some such mongrels, was a droll against his will. Sad fate to him who, even in his efforts not to be the cause of mirth in others, could himself become the butt of those whom, not more stupid, he could, in his self-protection, afford to despise. But Merrylees had at length fallen among his enemies, and must abide the issue of a terrible revenge.

By about the hour of half-past twelve they had reached a part of the road where, by the convenience of a slap, they could leave their equipage, with the donkey’s neck fixed to a post, and his head within reach of some tempting provender. All this arranged to their satisfaction, they searched about for stray loungers, none of whom could be espied,—so straight they went to their destined work. As familiar with the burying-ground as they were with their own squalid dwellings, they were soon among the green hillocks, few of which, as they saw by the light of the moon, which came upon them in fitful gleams, making all these sombre things more like the productions of feerie than of honest nature, held out any temptations to these lovers of new sod. But at length the “Spune” stopped at an elevation more recent than any around it.

“This is the grave of Merrylees’ father anyhow,” said the superior.

“Then out with him,” said the stolid Mowat.

“Still the idiot,” said the other. “Did I not tell you last night he’s gone into powder ten years ago, and that it’s the sister we’re after?”

“Then out wi’ her,” was the sulky reply.

Nor did the “Spune” need the stimulus of the stolid. He began straight the work,—difficult and arduous to all but such adepts,—puffing, and drawing wind to puff again.

“Hush!” said Mowat. “I heard a noise.”

And the “Spune,” who after all was a great coward, stood motionless to listen, but all was so still, even as the dead that lay around, that even the breathing of the men sounded like strong whispers. Then away wrought the reassured again, and anon the screwing, the jerking, the pulling, till at last came the final pull, shewing, in the passing beam, the long white shroud, with what it enveloped, extended on the green turf. At that moment the whole area rang with a shout, something between a roar and a yelp, and looking round they saw, behind a low head-stone, a tall figure in white (of course), with its long arms tossed up as with a sudden fling. The apparition was appalling even to men who had no more faith in ghosts than they had in souls; and just as another toss announced the coming shout, they took to flight, staggering as they flew over the numerous inequalities, but making more speed under the spur of terror than ever they had done under that of mammon. They were gone.

And now the apparition, after making some more strange movements, proceeded to take off a white sheet, which he deliberately stuck into the bottom of a coarse bag. Two or three giant steps brought him to the spoiled place of rest.

“And you’re there, Sarah Merrylees?” he said, in a voice sufficiently hollow for the part he had so recently assumed. “The ‘Spune’ is without its porridge this time; and shall not man live on the fruit of the earth?”

And one might have fancied there was a chuckle, as if the creature had been satisfied with its own fun. But now came the part of this tragedy which will for certain be scouted as the work of fiction, but which as certainly made a part of the story. Merrylees,—for it was he, who, having met David Cameron of the West Port on the previous night, had learned the intention of his friends to visit Penicuik, and thereby came to the conclusion that his presence there would be useful,—then took out a rope, and, having gone through a process at which he was very expert, he was soon standing by the side of the wall under his burden of Sarah Merrylees. Nor was it long till he reached the high road, where, keeping by the dark side of the hedge, he intended to proceed to a convenient spot where he might leave his load till he could contrive to bring a conveyance. He had not proceeded far when he heard the roll of the cart, and saw his two friends alongside of it. There was no time to throw away over the head of such an opportunity. So, depositing his burden at the foot of the hedge, close by his side, he ran forward as far as was safe, crying out, “Stop the robbers!”—Nestor Graecos objurgavit; whereupon the terrified “Spune,” with the white apparition still in his mind’s eye, fled with renewed precipitation, closely followed by Mowat, and leaving David Cameron’s cart with the donkey to whatever fate might overtake it. The coast being thus once more clear, and being well satisfied that his friends were too cowardly to return, he ran forward and stopped the donkey; then returning for his burden, he carried it to the cart, wherein he deposited it. A long sauntering journey brought him to town, where, after going through many manœuvres, he at last contrived to lodge his capture in the hall of the Square.

This terrible story—which, we may add, was a favourite among the students—was told by Merrylees, so far as pertained to him, as altogether applicable to another body, whereby he afforded proof that there is no hardness of heart to which man can attain that is utterly exclusive of a spot where some permeating feeling still supplies the issues of shame. About his part of it the “Spune” had small compunction; but, to confess the truth, it was not till we knew what occurred afterwards that we could bring ourselves to believe that it was possible for it to be true.

To those who know human nature, in the only proper way in which it can be known, it is scarcely necessary to say that we are always under the influence of that error which induces us to estimate the feelings of others by our own. But there is something about these judgments of others even more fallacious, in so far as it almost amounts to an impossibility that we can, through a feeling present, fancy the total absence of it in others. Unable to attain to a negative except in relation to the positive, through which it is thought to be seen, we must either project in some way the matter of our thoughts and feeling into the supposed non-existent, or not think at all. If we could suppose a total death of the affections in a brother as easily as the overwhelming domination of money, we would not deny credit to this most wonderful story; but there lies the difficulty, and you must get out of it the best way you can. Even if you don’t succumb in despair, you are far still from the Court of Cacus, so soon to be opened to you by a pen, even as hell was opened to Virgil by the golden ramus.

Resumption of the Great Drama.

The man whom, in our first chapter, we described as a neophyte, left the students with his bashfulness, if we can so call it, supplied by confidence. The power which we have already seen making such havoc among feelings and affections deemed all but ineradicable, had produced the first thrill in a heart long since dead to the pulses of pity. We may say so much, that his life, prior to this day—when there opened to him a vista through which he could see, amidst moving furies, the illuminated figure of mammon, with the means of getting money without hard labour—had been little else all through than a wrestle with poverty, often degenerating into squalid misery; and we may thus estimate the state of his mind, under the new-born hope of what, to such a man, might have the appearance of a small fortune.

But even with the view which the information given him by the students opened up of a new means of making money, we are not entitled to suppose that, as he that night directed his steps to the Cowgate with the intention of reaching the lodgings which he occupied in the West Port, he had any prevision of the extent to which this new pursuit would lead him. His expectations could only, as yet, be limited to the acquisition in some way of those objects required in the halls of the Square, and the value of which had previously come to his ears through the medium of that under-current of whispers to which the exploits of Merrylees, and the others then in the full progress of their career, had given impulse and meaning. Sure it was, at any rate, that he was utterly unconscious that he was permitted to be an agent, selected after due care by the devil, to push and force those passions by which a Christian country, with a name renowned throughout the world for virtue, had been scourged and scathed to a climax. Far less could he foresee the means—to our obscure vision of the ways of Providence—so out of proportion to the evils (already set forth by us) which they remedied, if not put an end to. So it has been said. But by what right do we make out that want of proportion? We know pretty nearly the amount of evil subsequently perpetrated by William Burke,—name of fear, and which even yet only passes in a whisper,—but we do not know (for all we have said is only an inkling,) and never will know, the amount of that other evil which his deeds were to be the means of bringing to an end. The cry had for years gone up to the great white throne of the outraged feelings of a Christian nation. There was only the exception of those who appealed to the pride of science, and man’s natural love of life and a sound living body. Meanwhile, those in power, to whom Heaven had accorded the means of reconciliation, looked on with apathy, at least without interest,—an observation which may lead us to the thought that there was less of profanity than is generally supposed in the suggestion which some have ventured, and some have approved, that this man had a mission, yea, that the devil was permitted to tempt him to commit deeds which would rouse the country to seek a remedy sufficient to stop the violation of natural feelings, and at the same time provide for the claims of science.

So, with the sordid thoughts suited to his mission, he trudged along, looking about for some one he expected to see; and by and by there came from behind, and joined him, an individual, in the shape of a spare wretch, gruesome and goulish, of moderate height, with a cadaverous face, in which were set, in the most whimsical manner, two gray eyes, so far apart that it did not seem possible for him to look at you with both at the same time. There was in these oblique orbs, too, a leer which seemed to be the normal and unchangeable expression of a mind which not only disregarded the humanities and rights of his species, but mocked and laughed at them. Most creatures, even the wickedest, are at times surprised into moments of bonhommie. Nature seems to demand this as a kind of rest to the spirit, as if evil were a disturbance, which, to be sure, it generally is; but the malignity of this wonderful being was so thorough-going, smooth, and natural, that even what he might intend for a bastard kind of love or friendship was only a modification of his diabolism, so that his smile was merely a relaxation of his congenital enmity towards all that was good and beautiful in nature. This man was William Hare,—a name which, not less than that of William Burke, will ever be as an apparition to the retina of the ear of mankind.

The forgathering of these men was followed instantly, but secretly, as if they feared the chances of a whisper having a collateral fall, by the reciprocation of confidences, in which, as a matter of course, was included the success of the visitor to the Square, and over the face of the listener there came merely a stronger phase of the ordinary expression of the malign pleasure which less or more always played in those divergent eyes. But these conferences cannot be understood without a knowledge of what had taken place in the latter’s house in Tanners’ Close, to which they were loungingly directing their steps, and where the former lodged. And many others lodged there too, for it was one of those low caravanseries or lodging-houses which are as well the refuge of trampers, who would pass there a night, as of more permanent residenters, who, deprived of a home by vagabondism, earned a desultory livelihood as chance carriers or troggan-mongers, fish-hawkers, or peripatetic dealers in small wares. Sometimes a lodger a little above these classes would find his account in the cheap refuge, and three days before that night a tall man, a pensioner, who ordinarily went by the name of Donald, had died, a short time only before his pension became due. To that pension the master of the establishment had looked forward as the means of being reimbursed for several months’ rent and advances, amounting to somewhere about £4. This loss rankled in the mind of Hare, for though Donald was not without some poor friends who would see him decently buried, they were without the means, as well perhaps the will, to pay a debt for the justice of which the bad character of the creditor could be no guarantee.

And here we have the best evidence, that even on that day when Donald died, and up to the morning of the funeral, and eight or ten hours previous to this forgathering in the Cowgate, no thought had crossed the mind of either of these men of taking the debt out of the body of the pensioner. Allowing for all discrepancies as to the time when the tongue of one of them gave expression to the dark purpose, it is clear that the communication would not, on the supposition of the thought having been slumbering in the mind, have been delayed till the morning of the funeral, nor even to the hour of bringing in the coffin. No doubt they had been both aware that such things had been done, and were being done, in Edinburgh at that time, and the temptation had crossed them, not without being accepted by their sordidness. The intention and the thought sprang up together, and, by all accounts, it was the mind of Hare that produced the birth; but the exclusiveness of the credit was just so much the less in proportion to the readiness by which it was on the instant adopted and cherished by his friend. You may here mark an analogy, which it might be of pregnant interest for all men, and women too, to ponder, as a little sermon, and not the less that this entire history is a big one:—The tiny seed will lie in the ground for years, and though the soil may be known to be congenial in the wealth of rottenness, it will not spring to the expectation of the gardener. It may be tossed over and over, and hither and thither for years, and appear above ground, shooting resolutely its stem, when not only not looked for, but against all expectation. So it is with the mind and its germs. The small shoot of an invention takes its start from an agreement of circumstances unknown to us, and grows and grows into branching horrors; nay, every branch, and leaflet, and poisonous calyx has its secondary origin in a germ as mysteriously stimulated as the one that lay so long perhaps in the earth. And what then? Why, just this—that our practical philosophy is ever vexing itself by tugging at the cords of Calvinism. Why and how did this thought arise in the mind of Hare? Because he was a wicked man. And why was he a wicked man? The old story of the scroll, whereon were marked in fire the names of the reprobates. But reject it, and say that he made himself a wicked man. Try that process upon yourself, if you happen to be a good one, or the opposite, if you happen to be bad, and see how you will succeed by such decree of your own.

The proposition was thus made that the body of the stalwart Donald should be sold to the doctors, and at once agreed to by the listener, only with the scruple that there was no time between the period of their conversation and the funeral to get all matters arranged—a sorry objection from such a man, and so accordingly made small account of by either. And so they straightway set about getting the bag of tanner’s bark—a circumstance which shews us that the practices of Merry-Andrew and his brethren had reached their ears. Nor are we to have the smallest hesitation in assuming that Helen M‘Dougal, with whom Burke lived in concubinage, and Hare’s wife—the two females in the house—joined to form that quatern destined to the orgies of the Court of Cacus. The bag of bark was speedily procured, the body of Donald hauled out of the coffin and deposited on a bed, the bark was put in, the lid screwed down, and all made decent and fair for the bearers. When the vice has fructified into an act, how easy is the tribute paid to virtue! And so these men, according to the normal course, joined with long faces the train of the mourners, among whom—though some of them who loved the jolly old pensioner had tears in their eyes—they could hold up, or rather down, their faces as mournfully as the best.

The interlude of this play of the forenoon, and the melodrama of the night, consisted in the appearance of Burke in the hall in Surgeons’ Square, and having forgathered in the Cowgate in the manner we have set forth, the two friends, bound together by prior confidences, of which no man ever knew the extent or nature, pursued their way to Tanners’ Close, where they were welcomed by the women with the remainder of the whisky got for the funeral. The offering was to nerve them for the work in which they were merely apprentices; nor was the offering given and participated in less cheerfully by the women themselves, that they had both applied the soft hand of feminine attentions to the gallant pensioner,—even hung over his squalid couch tenderly, and wet his dry lips, and all the more, surely, that he had been a soldier, had seen and mixed in battles in his day, and therefore deserved something better than a bag for a winding sheet, and the knife of the anatomist coming after, at so long a distance, the bayonet of the enemy. Such gilt, which shews itself everywhere as society gets more civilised, is easily rubbed off; and with the knowledge of these tender nurses, the two men proceeded to their work, which, coarse as it was, was easily executed. The bag was filled and hoisted on the shoulders of Burke, who carried it in the dark as far as Bristo Port, where Hare, as a relay, took up the burden. So well known along the Grassmarket and Cowgate, where their figures might have excited attention, they took then the round-about way of College Street, and, getting to the Square, they felt some of that hesitation—shall we call it bashfulness?—which Burke had betrayed at his prior visit. They accordingly placed their load at the door of a cellar in the lower part of the buildings, and mounting to the room where one of them had been before, encountered the same three young assistants still engaged in their ardent work.

“Bring it up,” was the reply of more than one, when they had heard the words of the merchants, as they hung fire in their mouths and tongues. Up soon it was, and drawn out and laid upon the table in the winding-sheet. Yes, a piece of delicacy that which was soon to be dispensed with as extravagant and unnecessary. And the covering partially drawn off, there is that rapid and curious, yet never perfectly composed, scanning of the eyes of even old students, but with no recoil on the part of the sellers, who had sat and drank with the old soldier, and heard his stories of Peninsular battles, and laughed at his jokes. Not the less racy these, that he thought his companions kind and jolly souls—how far away from the intention of selling his body for gold he never imagined, for the idea could not have entered the mind of Suspicion herself, if there be any such goddess in the mythology of poets. But all such reminiscences, if they threatened to force an entry into the minds of these men, were quickly sent back to the limbo of obliviousness by the obdurate mammon.

By and by, and after the exit of one of the students, there came in the monoculus himself, Knox, and the covering was altogether withdrawn. It seemed to him a fair mercantable commodity. That is, it was not too old for any of the valuable tissues,—in the midst of which lay the secrets these students were so anxious to reveal, not for the purpose of filling their pockets in after-times, but for the benefit of mankind,—to have been dissolved or injured. Seven pounds ten shillings is pronounced as the price of the body of the veteran. A shadow passed over the faces of the sellers; the sum did not come up to the hopes inspired by the reports which had oozed out of the earnings of the Merry-Andrews and the “Spunes.” Yet the sum, to these wretched earners of pennies for vagrants’ beds and cobbled shoes, was a coup of mammon sufficient to have made their hardened hearts clatter upon their ribs, and scare away the last trace of humanity inspired by the lips of a mother, kept otherwise, and up to this time, unscathed by the temptations of the devil. But they could not refuse the sum,—that is, they had not yet hardihood to chaffer; and, the money being paid, they were on the eve of departing, when they were told that they would be made welcome again, if they came with an equally good recommendation. And as they went, they did not forget the shirt.

So, with the first spoil in his pocket—for Burke was the foremost man, and got the money—he and his friend betook themselves to Tanners’ Close, keeping, no doubt, in remembrance, the words of the students, that they would be welcome again. Nor can we have any doubt that when they arrived at home, after a day of such novel and ingenious, and, we may surely add, triumphant performance, they would celebrate, with the women, in an orgie debauch of hours, this great event of a new birth of hope, the realisation of which would elevate them even to an upper caste among the humble inhabitants of Portsburgh. But even they themselves did not know what progeny would come of this cockatrice’s egg, laid in the dark corner of the habitation of sin. Our story would not have carried that moral, which is the eternal burden of all histories of crime, if the thought of murder had come to them without that prelusive conciliation, under the condition of which the devil is permitted to arrive at his greatest achievements.

Much, even at this early stage, was made of the conduct of Knox and his assistants, but, we think, with little justice to these men. Why did they not ask those dark and suspicious-looking ruffians, who did not belong to their regular staff, where they got the object thus brought to them? The answer appears to be satisfactory, whatever might be thought of their subsequent defence and explanations. There was nothing here to excite suspicion, except, as it was said, the absence of certain marks often made by resurrectionists in their process of working, but the exception went for nothing in the face of an assertion that such marks are seldom to be seen; and then, as for the asserted naturalness—if we may use the expression of an inquiry of such a kind—it was said, and may be repeated, that that which appears to be natural is not always expedient. We are here to keep in view that the medical men were aware that they were dealing in smuggled goods, the participation on their part being, as they conceived, justified by the necessities of their profession; and when was it ever known that the dealer with a smuggler questioned him as to the whereabouts and the manner of his contravention of the laws? It does not need even to be remarked, that to discourage is not the best way to lay the foundation of a new bargain; nay, there was weight in the observation, that the prudent avoidance of such interrogation had become a habit, and though they were perfectly aware that bodies had been brought to them which had never been in graves, and, consequently, that there existed a practice of sale and purchase between the men devoted to this profession, and the friends or distant relatives of the dead, they still considered that all such cases were covered by the claims of science, whereby society got returned to it, in the shape of an increased knowledge and skill of cure, that which had been taken from it against the sanction of human affections. Then it was admitted, even by the “howlers,” that never, up to this time, had there been offered a body which could be said to have borne marks of violence; and if the minds of at least these generous and well-bred youths never entertained a suspicion of murder, the fact might more properly have been adduced as honourable to their estimate of mankind, than as an objection to their want of guard against an evil which had not yet appeared in the world, and which was to become, unhappily, in good old Scotland, a new species of crime.

The Quaternion.

We suspect there is scarcely a life of a great man, whether he has been great for good or for evil, in which you will not find passages that are analogous to some things in your own. As with the physical monsters, described by such men as Dr Denham, in which there is always a natural foundation out of which grow the amorphous excrescences which we call monstrosities, so in the moral there is always something that pertains to the natural, insomuch that we may say, that the abnormal beings who go by the name of monsters are, as respects their unenvied peculiarity, the result of a twist in the development of what was intended to be according to the ordinary rule. The observation may serve as a cave diabolum even to those who think they are for certain out of the reprobatory decrees.

William Burke was born in the parish of Orrey, county of Tyrone, Ireland, in the spring of 1792. When at school, he was distinguished as an apt scholar, and was, besides, cleanly and active in his habits. Though bred a Catholic, he was taken when very young into the service of a Presbyterian minister, a circumstance which may explain the religious tendencies he subsequently exhibited; but even at this early period, he began to shew signs of that versatility of purpose which, leading sometimes to success, more often ends in vagabondism. Having left the minister to try the trade of a baker, he renounced that for the occupation of a weaver; and from that he enlisted in the Donegal militia. Yet in the midst of these changes he observed so much moral regularity that he was selected by one of the officers as his servant. While thus employed he married a young woman in Ballinha; and after seven years he returned to live with her, on the disbanding of the regiment. Still with a fair character, he then became the servant to a neighbouring gentleman, with whom he lived three years. Meanwhile he had a family by his wife; and having taken it into his head that he would be able to maintain them by getting a sub-lease of a piece of ground from his father-in-law, who was himself a tenant, he insisted for this right, which was refused, and the quarrel which ensued sent him to Scotland. Still, however, even in his advanced manhood, without any other stain than an imputed infidelity to his wife, we are assured, at least, that as yet he had shewn no indications of what may be termed cruelty even by the fastidious, if it was not that he bore the reputation of mildness approaching to softness.

Yet he came to Scotland with this blot on his soul, and it was soon deepened, when, having gone to work as a labourer on the Union Canal, he fell in, at Meddiston, with Helen M‘Dougal, a comely, if not good-looking, young widow, then residing there after the death of her husband. It has been always said that this was an affair of love, at least it ended in a connexion so close that they resolved to live together.

It would appear that the connexion thus formed having been communicated to his priest, he was admonished, and recommended to return to his wife; and a consequence of his refusal was the ordinary excommunication. Yet he continued to have religious fits, during the continuance of which he avoided the chapel, from the terrors of the anathema. We trace him afterwards, as he returned with his paramour to Edinburgh, where he fell, as the consequence of his continued versatility, into peripatetic pedlery, buying and vending old clothes, skins of animals, human hair, and other small articles and wares. Nor did he stick by this, soon betaking himself to cobbling, for which, in a rude way, he discovered that he had a turn, though he had never been taught the craft; and by purchasing old shoes and boots, to which he applied his art, and getting M‘Dougal to hawk them, he contrived to realise fifteen or twenty shillings a-week. At this time he was a lodger in “The Beggars’ Hotel,” kept by the well-known Mikey Culzean,—an establishment which had a famous termination, when, being one day burned to the ground, there came forth, driven by the flames, such a swarm of beggars, halt and blind, that their congregation seemed as difficult to account for as the assemblage of a colony of rats. Among them appeared Burke and M‘Dougal; but there were left behind in the fire the library of the cobbler, consisting of Ambrose’s “Looking unto Jesus,” Boston’s “Fourfold State,” “The Pilgrim’s Progress,” and Booth’s “Reign of Grace.” Once more he became a lodger with Mikey, who took up a new hotel in Brown’s Close, Grassmarket.

That the man, originally neither cruel nor profane, was not yet, like Balaam, left to his idol, would appear from his continued religious exercises. The grace of the Lord tracks the devil in his darkest caves. In the next house the candle of salvation burned, and even cast its light into the thick atmosphere of the surrounding dens. Thither Burke repaired, and joined, with apparent seriousness, in the exercise of devotion; nor did he fail to tax the incurable Mikey with profanity, when that notorious lover of a joke, even at the expense of divine things, thrust his head through the papered partition, and cried out, to the dismay of the devotees, “The performance is just going to begin.” In all this there seemed to be no hypocrisy, because there was no use to which he tried to turn it; and then his conversations on the subject of the service, which, after the company dispersed, he had with the man in whose house the meetings were held, seemed to be too secret for the displays of the mere dissembler.

Other traits conspired to shew the nature of the man, before the temptations of the idol changed it. Kind and serviceable, inoffensive and playful, he was industrious as well, and seldom inclined for drink. Fond of singing and playing on the flute, he sought, in his melancholy moods, the solace of plaintive airs. All which qualities were combined with a jocular and quizzical turn, which, displaying a fund of low humour, made him a favourite. Some anecdotes are given in illustration,—as where, one day, when he heard a salt-wife bawling out, “Wha’ll buy salt?” he replied, “Upon my word, I doun’t know; but if you ask that woman gaping at the door opposite, perhaps she may inform you;” or where, on another, when, having been abused by a painted Jezebel on the High Street, he tried to shame her by an accusation: “I might have passed over the painting,” said he, “if it had been properly done, but it’s shameful to come to the street bedaubed in that unskilful way,”—an objurgation which was applauded by the bystanders.

Yet, withal, there were deductions to be made from such favourable accounts, inducing the conviction that there is small faith due to drawn characters, where, perhaps, the potentialities may have been asleep, only awaiting the touch of the demon. But is not this less or more the case with all of us? if it be not metaphysically true that every unregenerated man has his price,—that is, every such man has a sacrifice of moral principle to sell, if a price and a purchaser can be found to his liking. What a million of money will not purchase, may be bought by the smile or tear of a woman. The paradox cannot be disproved, because the eventualities of temptation cannot be exhausted in any one man’s life. This man, though appearing to have kindly feelings, could be cruel to the woman who, whatever her faults, had followed him in all his wanderings and misery; but then, of course, there was the occasion, as where, having roused her jealousy by attentions to a young woman who was related to her, he, in return for her complaints, almost murdered her. The story current at the time was, that the three having slept in the same bed, the quarrel began between the two women, who, betaking themselves to the floor, entered into a battle. So long as the conflict was maintained on nearly equal terms, the man contented himself with witnessing it; but when the elder virago was likely to master the young one, he rose out of bed, and interfered in behalf of the latter. His interference soon turned the scale; and he inflicted an unmerciful punishment upon his partner. Then came the neighbours, who found M‘Dougal extended upon the floor apparently lifeless, with the man standing by, and contemplating. After some time she exhibited signs of life, when again seizing her by the hair, he cried, “There is life in her yet!” and dashed her head violently on the floor. By this time the police were attracted by the noise, who, upon asking Burke whether the woman was his wife, got the reply in a mild, if not insinuating tone, “Yes, gentlemen, she is my wife.”

We thus get to one of the secrets of this man’s character. The passions are said to occur in opposite phases—strong loves, and strong hatreds, and so forth; but there is one which nature, in love, has reserved, pure, solitary, and unchangeable, without counterpart to dim its lustre, or antagonist to neutralise its effect, and that is pity. This man wanted pity. If we were fanciful, we might here go with the gentle poets, who tell us, in their way, that, like the dew-drop which falls in the evening, and shines equally clear on the deadly nightshade and the rose, it solaces virtue in adversity, without scorning sin in the pains of retribution. If, in our analysis of man’s character, we find not his heart, as the fire-opal, enclosing one of nature’s tears, we may throw the crucible aside, extinguish the fire, and cast the caput mortuum to the dogs; and yet dogs have pity. We have found, even already, enough to lead us to another clue. He possessed radical cunning, the greatest and most insuperable of all the obstacles to moral and religious emendation. Other evils only hang about the heart, but this, the true gift of the devil, is the very blood of the organ. We are, then, led to suspect him of religious hypocrisy. If we were not told there is hope for all, we might surely say that the advent of the Spirit of grace is possible in every case but that of hypocrisy veiled by religion; yea, the creature cursed with this vice, Faith views in the distance as an impossibility, and flies past in despair, to try her persuasions on the honest sinner.

The subsequent notices of this man’s life, up to the commencement of the deeds which have rendered him famous, only tend to confirm these observations. Renouncing once more his cobbling, he went, still followed by his partner, to Peebles, where he was employed in road-making. Though still maintaining some pretensions to religion, he now began to shew a gradual deterioration of character, keeping suspicious hours, and making his house the resort of profligate characters, where scenes of drunkenness and riot were of common occurrence, especially on Saturday nights and Sundays. Retaining the same vagrant habits, he next betook himself to Penicuik, and after the harvest of 1827, still accompanied by M‘Dougal, he came once more to reside in Edinburgh, where the occasion offered of getting acquainted with Hare, and becoming a lodger with him in his house in Tanner’s Close, called Log’s lodgings. This house, which afforded room for seven beds, was kept under the name of Mrs Hare’s first husband, Log, and being the resort of all kinds of loose wanderers, washed off from the lowest bed of the conglomerates, was the scene of still greater riots than the lodger had ever patronized in his own. That the intimacy between him and his landlord had soon ripened into such friendship as these people are capable of, was proved by an occurrence mentioned by a person who called on Burke with the intention of giving him a job. He found Hare beating without mercy his friend’s paramour, who was extended on the floor, while Burke was sitting unconcernedly at the window. When asked why he allowed another man to beat his wife, “Oh, she deserves all she is getting,” was the reply. Yet the man still preserved more of a respectable character than those with whom he here associated—retaining even yet much of his disposition to serve, his quiet humour, if not a species of politeness, all of which was perfectly reconcilable with the presence of that potentiality of crime which lay slumbering in the heart, under the thin veil of religion, and not to be crossed or checked, when roused to action, by pity, no trace of which appeared to be in him. He was set aside for his idol, and only waited the temptation to become what he became.

William Hare, the second of our quaternion, was also a native of Ireland, having been born in the neighbourhood of Londonderry. Like so many of the poor children of that country, he was never trained to any trade whereby he might have been saved from that gradual descent into desultory modes of earning a livelihood, which leading, as we have already said, to vagabondism, is the introduction to so many temptations. After working at country work for some time near his native place, he came over to Scotland, where he engaged as a common labourer upon the Union Canal, and assisted for some time in the work of unloading Mr Dawson’s boats at Port-Hopetoun. It was here that he became acquainted with Log or Logue, to whose widow he was subsequently married, and with whom he came to lodge. After the canal was finished, he betook himself to the occupation of a travelling huckster, going about the country with an old horse and cart, selling at one time fish, at another crockery, or exchanging the latter for old iron, which he disposed of to the dealers. From the cart and the horse he went down to the hurley, using that vehicle for much the same purposes. Some quarrel with Log, before the latter’s death, drove him to new quarters; but not long after, and when Log had been dead and buried, he returned to Tanner’s Close, where he assumed all the rights of the landlord of seven beds, as well as the privileges of the husband, though Mrs Log was never called by his name.

It was now that, having tasted power in becoming a landlord with such drawings as twopence or threepence a night, he shewed more of his character than had previously been known. Always inclined to take drink, wherever and whenever he could get it, he now, as a consequence of idleness and opportunity, became drunken and dissolute—the effect of liquor being to render him quarrelsome and always ready to fight. Nay, so strong was this propensity in him, that he appeared always to be on the outlook for a contest, picking a quarrel upon any opportunity, and even trying to make one out of the simple act of looking at him. Though a sorry pugilist, he had no fear of an opponent twice his size, and never gave in until fairly disabled—even then endeavouring to wreak, in so far as oaths could, a vengeance on the head of his enemy. On the failure of an opponent without, he had no difficulty, so long as Mrs Log was there, of finding one within; nor was she, also a drunkard, loath to encounter him upon equal terms, so that the house was seldom free from brawls, if it did not often exhibit a regularly-contested battle between the master and mistress. Even vice has its traits of ludicrousness. Those of the neighbours who were fond of sights were often enough gratified by some wag going and reporting to the landlady that Willie Hare, as he was usually called, was upon the street drunk, whereupon the wife, herself probably in the same state, would issue forth in search of him, when a battle was the issue of the rencontre. Such was the kind of life led by this couple up to the time of Burke’s entry.

The passion of violence produced by inebriation will not always, or indeed often, afford any clue to character. It may be hardly necessary to say that Hare was naturally cruel, yet we have seen that Burke could scarcely be said to present that feature unless when roused by some strong motive, so that we have no difficulty in finding at the first glance an essential difference in the two men;—the one being, in his very nature and constitution, vindictive and malign—the other ready to suffocate the humanity that was in him at the beck of an impulse strong enough to move him. Only one of them could probably have been guilty of such an action as this: On one occasion, when a person of the name of M‘Lean (the narrator) was returning from shearing at Carnwath, he got into company with Hare, Burke, and his wife, and the party went into a public-house at Balerno, near Currie, to get some refreshment. When the reckoning was, as they call it, clubbed, Hare snatched up the money from the table and pocketed it, whereupon Burke, in the fear of a disturbance, advanced the sum. On leaving the inn, M‘Lean taxed the offender with his trick, who, in place of being ashamed or even pocketing the affront, knocked the feet from his companion, laid him on the ground, and kicked him with his shoe pointed with iron plates. If we add to this inborn malignity which, in feeling, whether expressed by words or acts, arrayed him against mankind, and scarcely ever alleviated by those emotions of friendship which are to be found in the most hardened breasts, that scorn of human nature, not unaccompanied with satirical laughter, to which we have alluded, we have that foundation of character in the man upon which was so easily reared the towering edifice of his crimes.

Yet after all this information, which was so industriously gleaned, the psychologist was not satisfied. He wanted to vindicate human nature from even a possible diverging incidence of a law which could account for such crimes, by tracing them to malignity and mammon. We would fain look with favour on such scepticism; and it is to be admitted that all who had the curiosity to see and converse with this man discovered a want. With a low animal brow, he justified the phrenologist by discovering no power of ratiocination, if, indeed, what is termed reasoning was not an impossibility to him. His mind was entirely under the government of external objects, among which selfishness made its selection, irrespective of the humanities, of which he had none. We might thus term him, as he has been called, a fool or semi-idiot, only within the limits of that responsibility which the law is bound, for the preservation of mankind, to push far beyond the verge where nature draws her distinctions between the morally sane and the insane. We thus get quit of the heavy imputation which the doings of such a man cast upon our kind; and if we are met by the reflection, that Burke had both thought and sense to an extent which was rather a surprise to those who conversed with him with a view to ascertain the structure of his mind, we have the advantage of the reply, that, naturally indolent, if not soft, he allowed himself to be ruled by another, who, with all his defects, possessed resolution and a dominating will. The history of mankind is full of the phenomena of “imposed will”—the source of more divergence from the normal line than we ever dream of.

We come now to the third of our quaternion, Helen M‘Dougal, a native, as we have said, of the small village of Meddiston, in the parish of Muiravonside, and county of Stirling, where her early years were spent. Her maiden name was Dougal. At no time, however early, did her character exhibit any such diversity of oscillation between the good and the evil, as, giving play to contending passions, creates an interest in the inquirer into human nature. All seemed to be straight, on and down from the beginning. At an early period she formed a connexion with a man, M‘Dougal, who resided in the same village, to whom she bore a child during the lifetime of his wife. After the latter’s death, the intercourse which continued led to cohabitation, passing for marriage, and she bearing his name. Afterwards coming together to Leith, where he followed his occupation of a sawyer, she was left alone, poor and friendless, by his death, which took place from typhus while he was confined in Queensberry House. She now returned to her native village, where she met with Burke, then, as we have seen, a labourer on the canal, when that intercourse commenced, the evil auspices of which were to be so terribly verified. Thereafter, wherever they resided, there seems never to have been much change in the character of this woman. In Edinburgh, Leith, Peebles, or Penicuik, she was always distinguished for loose and drunken habits; nor were these ever relieved by any geniality of nature, the uniform expression of her mind and countenance being a stern moroseness which concentrated upon her universal dislike, so that it was often said that she was unworthy even of Burke. From all this it may easily be induced that she was not, in the crimes of which she was cognisant, or in which she took a part, under any influence of an imposed will on the part of Burke; the contrary being rather to be presumed, that she ruled him, and that it was only when he was roused by her fierceness of temper or jealousy that he repaid her domination by a cruel punishment.

The last of the four, Margaret Laird or Hare, was, like her husband, a native of Ireland, and accompanied her first husband, Log, to Scotland. The latter bore the character of a decent, hard-working man, who had not only the world out of doors to contend with, but within, the temper of a masculine wife. Some success enabled him to become a small contractor on the Union Canal, and for some time he worked his contract, with a detachment of his countrymen, in the neighbourhood of Winchburgh; but we may estimate the extent of his contract, and not less the Irish peculiarity of both the man and his wife, when we know that the contractor’s lady worked along with the men in the character of a labourer, with a man’s coat on her back, wheeling a barrowful of rubbish as stoutly as any of her men. At that time, they inhabited a temporary hut on the banks of the canal, and, whatever her faults may have been, she exhibited here nothing but economy and industry. The work being finished, Log settled in Edinburgh, where, though honest enough, the contractor became sunk in the huckster, and the keeper of a beggars’ hotel, which was soon to rival even Mickey Culzean’s. Upon his death, the lodging and furniture, such as it was, with any small earnings he had saved, devolved upon the widow, and thereafter she conducted the establishment; but she soon shewed the smallness of her gratitude and the strength of her passion by cohabiting with one of her lodgers, described as young and good-looking, and, thereafter, the depravity of her taste in accepting Hare after the young lover forsook her. Yet her choice was only that which is made by those who seek their kind. The drunkard and semi idiot had charms for one who was herself destitute not less of virtue than of prudence, and we are soon to see her descending into unparalleled crime, not by the imposed will of Hare, but the ready suggestion of her own heart.

Such are the characters of our wonderful story; and we make no apology to sensible men for disentombing such specimens of our kind from the dust-covered chronicles of their deeds. A salutary horror, not only of their great crimes, but also of those lesser ones which led to these, pervaded the people of Scotland long after the tragedy of so many acts and scenes was performed; and thus it is, in the providence of God, that virtue becomes brighter by the contrast with vice. It is only, as some one has observed, when the tempest tosses the waves of the ocean into mountains that we see into its depths. It was by the light of burning Troy that Æneas saw the faces of the gods; and so it is through the light of human passions that we discover the nature of the heart of man.

The Opening of the Court—The Old Woman of Gilmerton.[5]

The house which went by the name of Log’s lodging-house, and which was occupied by William Hare, as raised by the favour of the widow to the elevation of landlord, was, as already said, situated in Tanner’s Close,—one of those narrow passages that wind from the north side of the West Port. The entry from the street begins with a descent of a few steps, and is dark from the superincumbent land. On proceeding downwards, you came—for the house, which was rased for shame, is no longer to be seen—to a smallish self-contained dwelling of one flat, and consisting of three apartments. One passing down the close might, with an observant eye, have seen into the front room; but this disadvantage was compensated by the house being disjoined from other dwellings, and a ticket, “Beds to let,” as an invitation to vagrants, so many of whom were destined never to come out alive, distinguished it still more. The outer apartment was large, occupied all round by these structures called beds, composed of knocked-up fir stumps, and covered with a few gray sheets and brown blankets, among which the squalid wanderer sought rest, and the profligate snored out his debauch under the weight of nightmare. Another room opening from this was also comparatively large, and furnished much in the same manner. In place of any concealment being practised, so far impossible, indeed, in the case of a public lodging-house, the door stood generally open, and, as we have said, the windows were overlooked by the passengers up and down; but as the spider’s net is spread open while his small keep is a secret hole, so here there was a small apartment, or rather closet, the window of which looked upon a pig-sty and a dead wall, and into which, as we know, were introduced those unhappy beings destined to death. The very character of the house, the continued scene of roused passions, saved it from that observation which is directed towards temporary tumults, so that no surprise could have been excited by cries of suffering issuing from such a place, even if they could have been heard from the interior den; and that was still more impossible, from the extraordinary mode of extinguishing life adopted by the wary and yet unwary colleagues. In this inner apartment Burke used to work when he did work, which, always seldom, soon came to be rare, and eventually relinquished for other wages.

It will thus be seen that this small dark room was the appropriate place where the words of secrecy would pass to the ear, or be blurted forth, coarse and broken, under the fevered brain of drunkenness. Since ever that night when the £7, 10s. flared its magnetic influence over their eyes, and was communicated, by confidence and sympathy, to the two females, the little world of this quaternity was changed. The women saw that other lodgers would die, and the inspiring hope, not so demoniac as to curdle the remaining drops of human kindness that refused to leave the female breast, pointed in the inevitable direction of gaudy finery, which they might flaunt in the wondering eyes of the poor people of Portsburgh; but so slow a process did not suit the inflamed passions of the men. Hare had been revolving in his mind a scheme to set up his own will as the arbiter of the occasion, which would secure more money, even as he wished it; and the secret of this talisman behoved to be communicated to his friend, now poor and miserable, and dissolved in habits of sloth and inebriety. It was in that small room, and while the two women were engaged in the front apartments, that this mystic rite was performed between the solitary inmates, over, as might be expected, the caldron fires of drink. Yes, the mouth found power to utter the words which came as the dictates of a mere desire for money, that they should seize the opportunity so often presented to them of people lying drunk and senseless, and deprive them, by suffocation, of life. The proposition was accepted under the same approving auspices of mammon, who had already made both his own; and under the force of that temptation involved in the words which had been uttered in Surgeon’s Square, offering a welcome to a return with a similar burden to that of the pensioner. You may cease to indulge here in those visions of the fancy which would represent human nature in convulsions, panting under the impression of a thought which, at first, produced a revolt, and then became conciliated. The “make” of each of these men was perfect under its own conditions, and if there was any seriousness, it was only a passing fear that they might bring their necks into jeopardy. Pity, which never lived in them, could not be said to be dead; the impress of the first money had burned into their souls; the welcome of the doctors rung in their ears; and Grace, studying them in the distance, had flown past them as an impossibility.

There is reason to believe that this resolution come to by these men, sitting together in this dark room, passed as an element into an orgy, different from all those in which they had so often indulged, if not from any that the world ever witnessed; nor was it modified, if it was not inflamed, by those visions of struggling nature expiring among their hands, which, rising as mere spectral forms, disappeared as soon before the images they pictured of a life of sensual indulgence and enervating sloth. If the project had sprung out of the ebullitions of intoxicated passions, it might have died away on the morrow, but, the result of calculation, it only received strength from the hopes which it roused, and which again were inflamed by the celebration. Nay, time, as day by day passed without a likely lodger coming in, increased the desire to begin, and chafed them into impatience. Hare accordingly resolved to commence prowling about the streets for some promising individual whom he might seduce into the house, and for some days he followed this occupation, but his efforts failed, and the report at night only again inflamed the desire of the morning. One afternoon, it was in December 1827, he again betook himself to the street, and for hours dodged about searching among the poor and miserable for some one who, already intoxicated, might offer those facilities to a beginner which were afterwards held of small account when practice gave proficiency and success confidence. At last he observed in the Grassmarket a decent-looking elderly woman (Abigail Simpson, as afterwards ascertained) whose wandering eye and irregular step shewed that she had got more of the publican’s drug than her perhaps weak head could carry. His eye was immediately fixed upon her, and the old smile, which always obeyed the bidding of an evil thought, played over his face, nor did he let her out of his sight as he dogged her irregular movements from place to place. He could see that she was poor, that she was probably friendless, and, above all, that she was tipsy, and he knew enough of degraded nature to tell him what the proverb has settled, Qui a bu boira,—he who has drunk will drink more. Making up to her, he introduced himself as one who had met her before, and to his delight, discovered that she was inclined to be communicative, if not garrulous. It was not a difficult matter to advise her to accompany him to his house, where he would treat her with the old bribe of “a dram.” So away they trudged together, the dissembler taking special care as he went to keep her on her course, from which she was every moment inclined to stray, by professions of interest and friendship.

Arrived at the lodging-house, the woman was introduced to Burke, with what looks between the two may easily be imagined, as an old friend, and drink was immediately procured. There was now a party which was joined by the two women, who, when they saw the men plying the stranger with whisky—the full value of which their difficulty in getting it to the extent they desired was sufficiently known to them—must have been aware that there was at the bottom of this generosity more than the friendship professed by men dead to the feeling, even as regards those who might have had a claim to it. The time passed, and the party became merry, nor was the stranger the least joyous of them, for had she not fallen among friends by sheer accident? and should she not prove her gratitude by being happy, ay, and communicating to them all her secrets? Was she not fortunate in being able to tell them that she was a pensioner of a gentleman in the New Town, who paid her regularly one shilling and sixpence a-week, besides little gratuities, such as the can of kitchen-fee she carried with her, and put aside till she should depart? Yes, and more, that she was blessed with a fine young daughter she had left at home, and who would be anxiously waiting her return. And then that daughter was not only good, she was beautiful, and the very pride of her soul. All this Hare heard; and he could carry out the play she had begun, even amidst the intentions he entertained, by expressing an interest in the mother’s paragon, so deeply felt, that, being unmarried, he would put in for her hand, provided the mother would consent. And consent she did, so far as her condition would allow, and here, newly forged, was another bond of friendship. Nay, when he and the daughter should have become man and wife, it behoved that they could not live without the good old mother—who, accordingly, would take up her residence with them, with no more cares of poverty, and no dependence upon the pensioning gentleman of the New Town.

Could any human creature be more happy? Nor were the actors less so, though for a reason so very different. But the drink went done, even with the forbearance of the men, that she who would pay so dearly for it should have enough for their purpose. Mrs Hare had money, and there was the can of kitchen-fee, which the stranger could sell, and take home with her—when the time came—the price, one and sixpence, to help her little pension, and get a dram at another time, when they would not be there to give it to her. Then, to make the play even more merry and ingenious, this small sum was, very soon after, again, taken from the now almost unconscious woman’s pocket, and laid out on more spirits, that the expected opportunity might be made more propitious. The scene progressed with even increased symptoms of noisy merriment. The old woman revived, and, under so many influences bearing on a kindly heart, did her best to sing some of her old songs—household words to her, no doubt, and feelings as well, with which she often at home wiled back the days of her youth, and charmed the ear of that daughter of whom she was so proud and so fond. Nay, we have the hearsay of the day for saying, that Burke contributed his part, singing, as he was so much in the habit of doing, some of those airs, generally, according to the account of those who knew him, sentimental, if not melancholy.

And here we are obliged absolutely to stop for a moment, not that we wish to intrude upon the reader a moralising spirit, where every word suggests a sermon out of more hardened things than stones, but that we are mystified, and are inclined to ask counsel. Could that man have had any sense of the beautiful in the sentiments of these lyrics which, it was said, he sang with feeling, if not pathos? Can it be possible that such a sense can be consistent with a demoralisation such as his? We suspect that it is. We are led to expect its impossibility by a reference to opposite, if not antagonistic, feelings: we cannot love and hate the same object. This is true, and would seem to disprove our proposition à priori. We can reconcile the contradiction only by having recourse to the different faculties of the imagination and the sense. The poet who has ravished his readers by a description of the beauty of female virtue and innocence has been found in a brothel. One of the most touching religious poems in the world has been sung by one who, among brawling revellers, maligned religion and its votaries. The praises of temperance have been enchantingly poured forth by a bacchanal. The oppressor of the poor has wept at a representation of affecting generosity. Any one may fill up the list without perhaps including a hypocrite. The imagination has its emotions, and the sense its feelings, or, perhaps, no feelings. The why and the wherefore touch the ultimate, and we are lost; but the fact remains, as proved by evidence, that William Burke could, in song, be pathetic.

Recurring to our real tragedy, the effect of the drink soon again sent the creature from her lyrics into a condition which might have suited the purpose of the men; but whether it was that, as beginners, they lost courage, or that lodgers came in and defeated their intentions, they failed that night in effecting their object. The unconscious woman was lifted into a bed, where she lay till the morning. A severe sickness was the consequence of the importunities of her new-made friends; and the colleagues, exasperated by their defeat of the previous night, were alongside of the bed, with offerings of sympathy, and more drink. In the midst of all this, she cried that she wished to get home to her beloved daughter, at the very time that she weakly accepted that which incapacitated her. By and by, the lodgers for the night began to leave the house; and the victim being once more reduced to unconsciousness, they fell to their work in the precise manner they had planned. Hare laid hold of the apertures of breathing, and Burke throwing himself on her body to repress struggles and keep down the ribs, maintained his position till the last sob escaped from the oppressed lungs; and the woman, after a struggle of fully a quarter of an hour, was a corpse. In the evening the body was conveyed to Surgeon’s Square, and ten pounds procured for it.

All this tragedy was being acted while the daughter, at Gilmerton, was waiting anxiously for the return of her mother. The evening had passed without exciting in her much alarm; but when the morning came, with no mother, and no intelligence, she became oppressed with fears. Without having tasted breakfast, she sallied forth. The village was gone through, and afforded no trace. She next directed her steps to Edinburgh, inquiring at every one she met if they had seen a woman of the appearance she described. At length she resorted to the house of the gentleman who paid the pension, but beyond the information that she had been there on the previous day, she could get no satisfaction. She then wandered through all parts of the city, calling on every one she knew, and putting the same question—if they had seen her mother?—but always receiving the same answer. No weariness oppressed her in this vain search. The night set in only as a prelude to the revival of her hopes in the morning; and search followed search, and day followed day, every hour diminishing hope. The time was now counted by weeks, and as these sped, by months, yet ever as the time flew, and the hope decayed, the love increased with every accession of her grief. At length even hope was relinquished, and all speculations were lost in mystery. The only conclusion that could rationally be come to was, that the missing one had wandered by the canal and been drowned; for that a human being could disappear and be for ever lost in the city of Edinburgh, with its humane inhabitants ready to render succour, and its vigilant police ever on the watch, was what no one could conceive. The explanation was to come at a time which, to grief, might be thought long in the future; and such an explanation to a daughter! ay, and a daughter of whom the mother was so proud and so fond.

The Mother and Daughter.

If we were to estimate the benefits derived from sacrificing to mammon, according to the material uses to which they are devoted, we would be apt to form a very humble estimate of his godship; but these, we suspect, constitute, even with the lowest of his worshippers, only a small part of the charm of his gifts. Seventeen pounds ten shillings, the price of one dead body, and that of the life and the corpse of another, produced a change in the economy of Log’s house and in the minds of its ruling inhabitants. This appeared first in the dresses of the women, who, from being little better than trulls, with clothes bought in pawnshops, and often not far removed from ragged tanterwallops, began to be equipped like respectable people. Bonnets were got from the milliner direct; and it is even said that fine prints appeared in gaudy colours on the two women of Log’s house. It was observed, too, that they held their heads higher, and walked more circumspectly, as if some species of pride—the kind we leave to the moral analyst—had asserted its universal power, undismayed by the scowl of vice. Lodgers began to be less cared for, as mere lodgers, though the most squalid of them had recommendations of another kind, of which they themselves were not aware; and as for the men, the producers of this wonderful change, they were now gentlemen at large—the huckster’s cart, the hurley, the old horse, the stool, and the awl-box, having been discharged and despised as unworthy of those who held in their hands a charm invested with even greater power than the ring of Giges or Mongogul, even that of turning, by a touch, the mortal part of human nature into gold.

Hitherto even the philosophers had been wrong in their estimate of man and the world on which he lives. The ill-natured cynics represented that, in his earthly aspect, man is a parasite on the great animal the world; preying on his fellow-creatures, he is, in return, preyed upon by parasites. There are those that prey upon his body, others that, in the form of pains, ride upon the back of his vicious pleasures. There are those that fawn upon him, and feed upon his fortunes, and when he dies he is eaten by parasites. But there was in reserve, and unknown to these detractors, a chapter on human nature only laid open to our time and country, for though the Easterns had their fable of the gouls, it was received only as a fairy tale by the Westerns, till they were surprised into a belief even transcending the images of Arabian fancy. Yet the more hopeful philosophers, who draw their inspirations from Calvary, where was seen the consideration for the shekels of silver, are not dismayed. Yea, in this lowly thing we call our body, which preys on garbage, and is preyed upon in return, is a microcosm, which represents, in extension, that which has no limit—in perfection, that which is without end—in beauty, that which the poet cannot, with all his inspiration, describe.

We would not be true to human nature if we limited the effects of this change in the fortunes of Log’s house to what we have already described. The vicious heart pants for pleasures to worry it. La lampe inextinguible du plaisir must burn, though fed with rancid oil extracted from decayed organisms; and so there was a growing increase, not only in the number, but in the intensity of the “enjoyments” of the bacchanalian nights. If the neighbours had noticed the external changes, they were not the less observant—though destined to be long ignorant of the cause—of what was nightly acted within. The brawls and fights were louder and more frequent, and the dithyrambics which mixed with them in grotesque inconsistency had more of the ménad of the priests of Cybele. Yet all this, by God’s law, was sternly a necessity: we need no moral here. Secrecy and publicity are separate instruments of divine retribution, working strangely and mysteriously to the same end. Even the ordinary secret sin corrodes the heart by its immurement, and the sin of Log’s house was not an ordinary one. The more it is suppressed, the greater the elasticity of the torment. When freed from the prison of the heart it produces that recoil of the good which isolates the criminal from the smiles of fellowship and the help of society. Yes, this is the point with the diverging paths of ruin or redemption, and Heaven still vindicates the old economy. If the sinner will be saved by penitence, he must give signs of his suffering, and the world will profit by it as well as himself. If he hurries to ruin, he will still give evidence of his agony. In either case, that Providence which watches over us will still serve its purpose.

Only one of these paths was here open, and the quaternity even rushed into it. The progress of the ruin must keep apace. The excitement, in the shape, to them, of pleasure, must be sustained; and above all, the men had tasted the power of money—not to be estimated by what it produced—in what simply pleased such strange natures. They had got their heads into the dagon temple, and though all the rest of the body was exposed, they felt, however much they were in danger of justice, that they had some security against a continuance of the misery and contempt of their prior lives. They must, accordingly, go on, for they were dipsomaniacs in blood. The £17, 10s. must, if it had not already, come to an end, under the expense of these nightly orgies, and, behold the prowler again out to look for a new victim.

There had been known to both of the men, and not less to the women, an unfortunate creature of the name of Mary Haldane, whose vagrant beat was the old scene of the Grassmarket. Her life had not been all through a succession of those scenes in which her class figure; for, previous to the birth of a natural child, the fruit of seduction, she had been not only respected for a fair reputation, but looked on favourably for those personal qualities so often the means of ruin. Then the demon drink had met her at that turn of the fortunes of so many of her kind, when decayed beauty is not compensated by the consolations of penitence. The road down was easy, even to that stage where flapping rags could scarcely cover the body. Need we say that this creature was likely, when the prowler knew from his own experience that she would drink to the point. One day he accordingly issued forth to seek for Mary, but Mary had been in the drink fever for days, and he could only regret that so favourable a condition had not ensued in Log’s house, where the termination would not have been the recovery which this time once more awaited her. Exasperated by his disappointment, he was only the more determined to overlook other tempting objects in that fruitful field of human weeds, fit enough for death’s scythe. Nor had he to wait long. Two days afterwards Mary was standing at the mouth of the narrow close up which she lived.[6] The moment he saw her, the old smile and eloquent twinkle again illuminated or darkened his face, for he was as sure of his prey as the fox is of its spoil when it sits in the roost with its head under its wing. Nor was the smile less expressive that Mary presented to him. The red and swollen eyes, the quivering cheeks, and all the other signs of that unhappiness through which the rebel spirit will still shoot its buoyance in spite of depressed nature. Misery is easily approached. The dram is again the bribe, and the kindliness of the offer a recommendation, which was as much a surprise as a pleasure to one from whom all kindliness had been long barred by the magnetic repulsion of poverty and degradation. Poor Mary was once more happy; and, accompanying her “friend,” she trudged along to the place where the envied stimulant awaited her.

As they were slowly wending their way along the West Port, the people, as some of them afterwards stated, looked earnestly at the couple, without being able to explain the sympathy which brought them together; for already Hare was upon the rise in society, with a new coat and hat, and even a tie; but the presence of the gentleman did not prevent the children from pursuing their old game of teazing Mary, nor could the threatenings of her protector keep them off. At this juncture, who should approach from the opposite direction but the colleague. The mutual smile—yea, more. Would Burke, who had the character of being serviceable to the unfortunate, permit Mary Haldane to be abused while he was present? He would protect the friendless; and so the boys got a drubbing, and injured misfortune was vindicated. Having accomplished this act of justice, Burke, who had now so little to do, and was so far above cobbling, proceeded on what had been intended as a pleasant stroll, while his friend and Mary held their way to Log’s lodgings. In a short time he was seen to return with a quicker step; and by and by they are all assembled in the little dark room “with the window looking out on the dead wall”—where the women, who knew that the money was getting exhausted, received them with their peculiar welcome.

Well, you expect something, and already the heart throbs,—and do not stop it; for pity does not close her eye upon the unfortunate, even where sin has contributed to the misery of the sufferer. But here you cannot help yourself: the inevitable recoil from cruelty will open the issues of compassion whether you will or no; and so strangely formed are we, that here you may be the more willing to acknowledge the soft emotion, that Mary’s eyes reeled with delight when she saw Helen M‘Dougal place upon the table a supply of whisky, which to her share would transcend even the necessities of “the want” after the fever. There was on this occasion no necessity for the siren song to charm into confidence where the bottle was, a band more hallowed, in the estimation of the guest, than the pledges of love. Neither Hare’s sardonic jollity nor Burke’s pathos was needed where the work was apparently so easy; and they were no longer neophytes, but adepts, not only in confidence, but manipulation. Yea, it was the work of apprentices, and they were journeymen; nor was it necessary that they should concern themselves with more than filling the glass and contemplating the imbodied value—ten pounds—as, by her fading energies and impending unconsciousness, it assumed its full proportions. All is ready—the drooping head—the closing eye—the languid, helpless body. The women get the hint. They knew the unseemliness of being spectators—nay, they were delicate. A repetition of the former scene, only with even less resistance. Hare holds again the lips, and Burke presses his twelve stone weight. Scarcely a sigh; but on a trial if dead, a long gurgling indraught. More required—and all is still in that dark room “with the window looking out on the dead wall.”

After a preliminary visit to the College, where arrangement was made for the reception, the colleagues carried their burden, at an hour approaching to twelve, to its destination. As usual, it was examined before payment,—the amount of which, in this instance, we do not know; but, whether from some want of success, consequent on the increased watchfulness over cemeteries, attending the midnight adventures of our friends Merrylees and the “Spune,” or from a greater avidity for science on the part of the surgeons, it is certain that, as the supply from Log’s lodgings increased, the value given for a burden became greater, amounting, in some instances, to £12 or £14.

The band was thus again supplied with resources, and the consequence was an increase of extravagance and riot—the former exhibiting itself in a still more inconsistent style of dress on the part of the females, and the latter in more frequent disturbances of the neighbours. Even questions began to be put to Helen M‘Dougal, which were parried by the intelligence that she communicated,—that she had fallen heir to some house property about her place of birth, and that it was only right that decent people should rise in the world, and take the use of their own. Nor was Mary Hare less adroit in her fences. But the explanations thus given of what appeared to be a mystery were not deemed satisfactory, though no theory could be formed by the remonstrants.

On the part of the fortunate crew, the sums they received seemed only to stimulate their avidity. Not now waiting for the dispersion of the earnings, they aimed at a store, perhaps apprised by some looming suspicion that their fortune was too good to last, and a strange circumstance soon threw another temptation in their way. Young Mary Haldane, the daughter of her whom we have seen so easily and suddenly removed from the world and life, with all those sins on her head which had accumulated from the day of her seduction, had been brought up by the mother to ways as shameless as her own. As yet, however, it was the morning of life to the girl, and it is not always or often that wayward affections spent upon men more profligate than themselves, diminish the love of such creatures to their parents, even if the latter ought, by their neglect, to have earned nothing but hatred. We have seen one daughter cast into inconsolable grief, another was to be a wanderer and inquirer for her parent, with another and even more terrible issue. Having ascertained, on the morning subsequent to that evening when the burden was conveyed to Surgeon’s Square, that her mother had not been seen on the previous night, Mary occupied the day in searching. The woman was a ken-speckle, the familiar object of all in the neighbourhood, as well as the game of the urchins; and much curiosity was added to the sympathy for the orphan, who, unfortunately, was scarcely less notorious. Many aided in the inquiry, but with no more success, of course, than that which attended the efforts of the daughter. It is still remembered how she went about in her decayed finery, with swollen eyes, and the tears on her cheeks, sobbing out her grief, amidst the fruitless question, “Had any one seen Mary Haldane?” At length, one of the neighbours was told by a grocer in Portsburgh, that the woman had been seen going towards Log’s lodgings in the company of William Hare—a trace which, as no suspicions as yet attached to the man, held out some hope of success.

The information was immediately conveyed to the young woman, who thereupon hastened to the West Port, where she got the story confirmed, with all the minutiæ of Burke’s gallant rescue of Hare’s protégée from the assaults of the urchins. Nor did she stop till she got to Log’s lodgings. Mrs Hare denied that the woman had ever been in her house—a statement corroborated by Helen M‘Dougal, who, in her new-born pride, resented the imputation that it could be possible for the beggar to have the impudence to approach the residence of respectable people; but Hare, who in the back room had heard the rencontre, came forth, and taking the part of the girl—with what expression of countenance to his companions, it would be difficult for a mere pen to give the symbols of an idea—sympathised with her, and even more, asked her to come into the room with the window opening to the dead wall, and get a dram to dry up her tears. The girl, also given to drink, was tempted, and complied with the kind invitation. It was not long till the colleague made his appearance, having, it is supposed, seen Mary enter when he was lounging idly about the top of the close. They were no sooner seated, and the whisky put upon the table by Helen M‘Dougal, than Hare began his explanation. He told her that her mother had spoken to him on that day when she disappeared; that she told him she was going to Midcalder, (where he knew she had some friends;) and that he had no doubt she would be found there, to the great joy of the despairing girl.

And no doubt the poor girl’s heart jumped to the valediction. She began to get cheerful under the new-lighted lamp of hope; and if there was any deficiency in the oil, it was supplied by the cognate combustible which, like all other agents of the same kind, consumes by its latent fires those who consume it. Glass succeeded glass, and with hope getting brighter and brighter before her eyes, now dry enough, and sympathy sounding louder and louder in her ears, what marvel that Mary Haldane should be as happy as those who had preceded her in those jubilations. She talked of her lovers and her youthful escapades—not forgetting those whisky-born fortunes, embracing equipages and servants, which are the continual destiny of the wretched, as if nature, in some mood of pity, made an imaginary compensation for real privations and as real misery. How little conscious was she that the two men, who responded so exuberantly to her wild aspirations, were watching when they would exhaust and bring her “to the point.” Nor was the issue long delayed. Mary was one of those who, once fairly begun, never stopped, if the means were in her power, till she had run the full course. The symptoms of the artificial narcosis began to shew themselves,—the thick speech, the heavy eye, the bent head, and only a little longer and she was extended on the floor. Let us not speak of this girl’s youth, the interest of her peculiar fortunes, with no chance ever given her of putting even the first step in the path of virtue. Why, there was, even in the estimation of those who stood over, ready for the work of their calling, a curious if not stimulating aptitude in sending her after her mother. Did she not call there to see her, and find her? and why should they defeat so laudable a purpose? The quarter of an hour’s suspension between life and death, with those mysterious agonies of which the organism is capable, even in the absence of manifestations, or at least in their suppression by external force, and Mary Haldane experienced the fate of her mother. And with her mother, too, she lay that night in the hall of Surgeon’s Square.

The Grandmother and the Dumb Boy.

It has been said, that in the course of one man’s life there occurs usually only one springtide on which he may direct his barque to fortune, and, so far as we have seen, this chance was not denied to the governors of Log’s lodgings; but nature has not equally decreed that the voyagers shall see beyond that fortune, or to what it may lead. Nay, is there not something in the circumference of the objects of a day, if not an hour, if not a minute, which, like that which surrounds the scorpion, keeps all inside inviolate from the anathemas beyond? But then the circumference is ever changing, and ever enclosing new objects, till the last, with an opening in the side, looks out upon the dark or light theatre of retribution or salvation. We sometimes see this solitary springtide surmounted by the shattered barque of age, from which the waters of life are fast receding, and yet the voyager moves on. His fortune is a hysteria, through the ecstatic delirium of which he cannot see the gulf before his nose. These two men and two women whose history we record were on their springtide, and we are not to wonder that, beyond the circumference of rock and cloud, they were prevented from looking; not that there were not openings through which they could see ruin, but that the insanity of a fruitful wickedness made them revel blindly in the buoyancy of their progress, heedless of all rocks and gulfs of retribution.

Poor moralising this, we suspect, as regards men whose pleasures, bought at such a price of a revolt against nature, could be termed only “painted pain.” But even they could not be exempted from the laws of human nature. The circle behoved to contain its objects, and to change from day to day till the last came, with the lateral opening looking into perdition; perhaps any other mode ever devised by man of bringing sacrifices to mammon might not have been utterly exclusive of an attempt to get into a caste above. Bankrupts, thieves, adulterers, and even ordinary murderers, sometimes in our day try their hands at this, and make wonderful successes, for even these crimes which make men what they are, are not absolutely incompatible with a modern conventional status; but the crime of the men of our history involved in its very nature the impossibility of ever holding up the head in any other way than a swagger of desperation, or directing the eyes to an honest face, except as a look of dogged defiance. So, in addition to those evidences of change at Log’s lodgings, we have only to mention the restlessness of the moneyed vagabonds driving them out to the streets to pull companions of their grade into drinking-houses, and treating them with the money which, however they might love it, burnt their hands that dispensed it. The delirium of intoxication amidst living objects that carried the mind out, was the refuge from, not the spectre of conscience, for conscience they had none, but that of justice, which no averting of the eyes could enable them to avoid, only the reeling of them could make it a changing phantasmagoria.

And why, when we have so much deeper tragedies to recount, ought we to stop our narrative to record—unless, indeed, for the mere sake of the arithmetic of murders—a mere interlude resorted to as a relief from dithyrambism? Childermas day came round again! Poor Joe the miller could bring his price of eleven pounds as well as the rest of them. No doubt, when he offered himself, in the heyday of his life, to Jenny the farmer’s daughter, he thought himself of greater account than merely eleven pounds; but men undergo deterioration. Even when rejected, he would have spurned the valuation when he sung that jolly song of independence so often sung by his craft, and which declares the determination that neither lawyer nor doctor would “e’er get a fee from him,”—true enough, yet, alas! not false in the reverse, that doctors would give a fee for him. Joe’s miscalculations were due to his ignorance of the effects of intemperance, for it will not do to say that these are known when every day brings up new developments of consequences resulting from this most dangerous of all the voluntary evils of man. Say that the drunkard dares the advent of poverty, crime, the horrors of delirium tremens—death,—could he say that this last is a greater violence to nature than that produced by the grip and the pressure which, in all these cases, were only consequent upon the inebriation, which, again, was the act of his own will? It was while in a state of inebriety that the prowler met Joe. He was already made and prepared, and the subsequent decoyment, the additional drink, the final onset of the grim actors, their success, were only the development of a drama wrought out by actors who took an advantage accorded by himself. Our authority for treating this case as a mere interlude is derived from the admission of Burke himself, who, as a great judge could estimate the importance of what by others cannot be estimated at all, for the simple reason that the smallest of these tragedies so far transcends all power of comprehension that comparison becomes a farce; yet though this once jolly son of a jolly craft might have earned the contempt attributed to a facility of dying, he was, we are assured, mourned in the hamlet of his birth, where his frailties, if condemned, were placed, as is too often the case, to the account of a good heart. Nay, for aught we know,—and we say it the more readily that no one can trace or enumerate the threads which the poorest of God’s creatures leaves ramifying from heart to heart, all to respond, as by electric sympathy, to the shock of his death,—the farmer’s daughter might even be concussed to tears—how much too late—when the terrible tragedy was divulged. We may be at least certain that Joe never dreamed that a man’s character in the world depends upon his manner of leaving it, or he would have saved his reputation by a greater resistance when the enemies were upon him, but he was also then too late: the devil, whom he might have fought with and defeated if sober, had taken on a strange form, and was unknown to the victim, for the reason that the victim did not know himself.

However unimportant he might be in these annals, the price which the miller brought was sufficient to stimulate the now, and long before, irredeemable actors to a deed which, in the estimation of Burke himself, as it must ever be in that of a blushing nation, stood unparalleled among his own atrocities, as by all experiences else it was unparalleled in the world. Before entering upon the detail, we feel inclined to philosophise a little. We have been obliged to speak of these men as men, because they possessed all the physical characters of the species. In a natural view it has been said that, by the presence of the lower animals in the world, man is more injured in his ideas of a high nature and destiny than he is benefited in the temporal advantages of being fed and clothed by them. The Roman felt the inconveniences of the presence of apes in the same world with him, when he cried out, in rage or satire or pity, Simia, quam similis, turpissima bestia, nobis! Then what is the use of these beings always putting us in mind of our resemblance to them? If we are to believe Pythagoras, Mr Tweddel, or Mr Smith, or any one of the vegetarians, we could, in their absence, live on herbs and fruits, and be clothed with cotton and linen. Their presence in the same world, and with so much in common with us, is a continual satire on man’s psychological privilege or peculium, and to get quit of this many early nations accorded a soul and a hereafter to them. The satire was inverted when men made gods of them. We of a modern age shew our respect by an act of parliament against being cruel to them; and secondly, by eating them. In the midst of such curious speculations we are always apt to forget that within the moralities of our species we have gorillas far fiercer than any brother or sister of that “splendid specimen” described by Du Chaillu, and yet the strength and savagery of this animal have been called in doubt.

One day, about a month after the disposal of Joe the miller, Hare was again on the track of the unfortunate, and this time, as it was said, sent out by his colleague, as if the latter had wished to seek in repetition the assuagement of familiarity. Alas! the old search. You cry me mercy, and I would forbear did I not know that truth must bear her crown amidst the lying conventionalities of refinement; and virtue, who is her companion, looks to her for strength, while she shines the brighter for the proximity of vice. Yes, the old threading through the mazes of human beings,—now passing between the ripe and the raw, the full-blooded youth and the tottering beggar, the rich and the poor—apportioning the meed of his approbation according to the selective affinities of the possible. Polypheme had no tastes; this man was refined. Yea, even like the good philanthropist who passes by those who do not require his help, and turns kindly to the maimed and the blind and the miserable, his were claimed by those on whom the hard and heavy hand of calamity had pressed. The goddess pitied Iphigenia, and made her a priestess, not because she was beautiful and the daughter of a great king, but because she was unfortunate.

But on this occasion the searcher was sought. While standing on the High Street holding the button of the ragged coat of an old man who pleased him, and whose escape, seeing he was a dipsomaniac, would be nothing short of miracle, there came up to him an Irishwoman, also advanced in years, apparently a weary tramp, her shoes covered with dust, and her poor clothes looking as if she had slept in them all night among straw. She was a stranger in a strange city, and by her side was a little boy whom she held by the hand, for he was one of God’s stricken—deaf and dumb—with that wistful peering of the eyes which is as often the effect of the infirmity as of the habit of solicitation. She told him that she was from Ireland, that she was on the search for some one of her countrymen or countrywomen whom she knew, and from whom she intended to claim that privilege of friendship and assistance which the people of that country, with all their faults, are so liberal in according. Was there need for a bond of confidence? He himself was of the ould country, and would he not assist a country-woman with a charge so helpless, so pitiful, so burdensome, except for the love which bore it? Nay, did he not know the very person she sought? and did she not reside in Log’s lodgings, whereto he would be so delighted to lead her? Happy escape for the button-held, and yet strange freak of the mind as it works awry often for an opposite; for he seemed, as he departed, to envy the new comer, who had thus secured the friendship of one now possessed of money, and not backward in shewing it.

So along they went, up between the high houses of Edinburgh’s principal thoroughfare and down by the then Old Bow, with its strange old fronts and leering storm windows, as if they were curious about the modern people, so unlike their ancient inhabitants, all which sights raised a wonderment in the western Celt, which could only be satisfied by questions, and which, again, were answered with as much particularity as if she was not only to see them all again, but to seek them out for a purpose. Then how the boy watched the face of the man, as if some instinct had told him he would befriend his grandmother, and be in the room of a father to him. And what had this boy ever learned yet through his eyes alone, to be able to read backwards the looks of love. Do we not get dreary? The road has no windings, and there are no trees to conceal the cave of skulls on the Aventinian mount. Once again with his victim,—for surely we cannot count the deaf and dumb boy with the wistful eyes as being destined to have his name—if it could be known in the strange country—recorded in the list, within the little back room. The colleague was there, lying drowsy from the prior night’s potations, but not unexpectant of the return of his friend. His eye brightened as the quickened orb threw off the drowsy vapours; and could he be otherwise than polite—the word is not misapplied—to the strangers? But where was the Irish friend? Oh, she would come in good time; and though it were long, did not Helen M‘Dougal place upon the table, in a goodly bottle, that which qualified the ardour of impatience? The boy must be cared for too till the friend came, and Mary Hare would do that duty in the front room—yea, might there not have been sweetmeats in Log’s lodgings when the Logs had now waxed wealthy? In two hours that woman was lying a corpse in the bed of the small room “with the window looking out on the dead wall.” The boy was dumb, but he had wistful eyes, and begged imploringly with these to see his grandmother. The women could not even lie to him, and tell him he would see her in the morning.

In the evening the two men sat over the fire in that same room, with the body of the woman stretched out on the bed which was at the back of the wall behind them. The boy was still under the charge of Mary Hare in the front room. Every moment that had separated him from his grandmother—to him all the world of his knowledge and affections—rendered the duty of the governess more difficult, and even strange sounds, between a groan and a scream, made their way out of his speechless mouth, as if nature in an agony struggled against her own decrees. The sounds found their way to the back room, and it came to be a question with the men, as they still sat looking into the fire, what was to be done with him. It was proposed by one, we know not which, that he should be taken out in the dark to the Canongate and there left. The policy had two reasons to support it. In the first place, he could not peach, and was therefore safe; in the second, they could hardly venture the offer of two burdens, however welcome at Surgeon’s Square, for fear of awakening suspicions, a reason, this latter, which was rejected by the other, supposed to be Burke, for the other reason, that the boy, when dead, could be kept in the house for a few days without great depreciation in value; and even if they should get for him a pound or two less, they could make it up upon a fresher one next time.

There was thus some little disagreement between the faithful friends, which must await a settlement; and, in the meantime, Hare went out to get a tea-chest for the conveyance of the inhabitant of the bed against the wall. On his departure, his friend sat ruminating. At one time, when alone, and amidst the sombre yet sometimes soft influences of melancholy, with her throng of shades of the past and gone, he used to sing to himself plaintive airs. Perhaps his melancholy at these times was poetical. These shades point to the ghosts of our friends, that seem to stand on yonder shore of the land of shadows, and beckon us to them. We resist the appeal from day to day for the sake of those that remain. These die too, and the crowd of beckoners increases, till all that formed our world seem to have flitted away, and then we make the sign of resignation to the hermit shadow (in his case the hangman) that is to lead us to them. If he ever did indulge in these plaintive airs, now was the propitious time, but his mind was engaged on something more practical—the resolution, turned and turned again, and examined and laid aside to come back—yes, the resolution to send the boy after his grandmother.

The night passed, the boy having by some means been made to understand that his protectress was in bed unwell, but the mutterings of the mute might have indicated that he had fears which, perhaps, he could not comprehend. The morning found the resolution of the prior night unshaken; and, in that same back room where the grandmother lay, Burke took the boy on his knee, and, as he himself expressed it, broke his back. No wonder that he described this scene as the one that lay most heavily upon his heart, and said that he was haunted by the recollection of the piteous expression of the wistful eyes as the victim looked in his face. The lad was laid on the bed along with his grandmother; and in the evening an old herring barrel held the couple who in life were each to each the one thing loved—and love is the same in the high and the low—had the same fate, enclosed in the same receptacle, and dealt with in the same way in Surgeon’s Square.

It was recorded that a curious incident happened in connexion with this affair which had wellnigh put a stop to the career of these wonderful men, and we cannot help thinking, in looking back upon it, that it should not have led to a complete discovery. The herring barrel, containing the two bodies, was placed in a cart. An old horse, which Hare had used in his traffic in fish and crockery-ware, was yoked to it, and the two set out in the darkening to Surgeon’s Square with their cargo. They proceeded along the West Port without anything remarkable happening, but when they reached the marketplace, at the entrance to the Grassmarket, the horse stopped, and, notwithstanding all their efforts, would not move a leg. They were in confusion. Exposure was imminent. As Burke afterwards said, they thought “the poor old horse had risen up in judgment against them.” A crowd collected, but, strangely enough, the people were so much occupied with the horse that they never thought of inquiring what was in the cart; and when it was found that neither entreaties nor blows would induce the animal to move forward, two porters were allowed to bear off the burden without any particular notice. Nay, these men so much less squeamish than the horse, took the barrel to the dissecting rooms without ever asking what they were carrying. The horse, which it is probable age and hard usage had arrested in its progress, was, in revenge for the fright it had caused its masters, led to a neighbouring tannery and slaughtered. It was of no value in Surgeon’s Square.[7]

The Stray Waifs

There is no great wonder that thinking people, while admitting ruling motives of action, should be chary about the question of their origin; how one rises out of another, and that out of one further removed, and so forth, as deep down as you please. The harlequin jackets may be removed one after another, till you come to the skin, which, being white, is said to be of no colour, only a negative, as also has been said of black. In another view, the subject appears still more unfruitful; for, as you may bring a tune, combining the grave and the gay, out of one length of catgut, so the human mind will give you off all sorts of feelings, some good and some bad, in the course of the same hour. In truth, as our doings are made up of passions and restraints, which latter may be passions as well, we will never understand thoroughly a human action. When we admit that these great criminals took away lives, right and left, for the sake of money, how much do we achieve? We just accuse them of what the Greeks called chrysomania, or madness for gold. Strange that in our country, where the passion is pretty strong, we have no such name, avarice being entirely different; but this passion may have been a rider on the love of drink, and then we cannot estimate either the one or the other, till we know the force of the countervailing restraints. If these—and there are many—are weak or nil, the passion may be a very weak affair, so that such beings as our principal actors might—seeing they wanted pity and religion and fear—have thought less of suffocating a fellow-creature than Bellarmine did of removing a fly from his face. With no pretension to be teachers, we offer these hints merely as explanatory of our manner of treating a subject much discussed at the time.

Of one thing, however, we may be certain, and that is, the effect of familiarity in removing those inconvenient asperities called scruples, which nature is continually casting up to preserve the triumph of the good over the evil; and so we may well be satisfied that every succeeding success operated with the double effect of confirming the prior purpose and stimulating to a repetition. This is merely the confidence inspired by habit, with which we are all daily cognisant; and therefore the subsequent atrocities ought really to excite less curiosity, though not less revulsion, than those that went before. Yet this is not found to be the case, and the reason is, that even great men in the murdering way are generally content with one trial, as being sufficient for all their power to carry before the judgment-seat of God.

It is always to be remembered that all these moral wonders took place in very quick succession, and only a few weeks pass until we arrive at the waifs. The actors had come to see that they had a great stage to perform on, and supplied as well with innumerable objects. They had only to look a few yards to the west, up Portsburgh, or to the east, up the Grassmarket and Cowgate, to be certain that “a ten pounds,” all prepared, was walking or staggering as if every roll to a side offered to be one into their arms. They had thus reason, if they had been of a philosophical habit,—and one had the poetry of sentiment—to thank the great genius Society for his injustice to his own members. And what an extraordinary injustice it appears, when we consider that the high head of Wealth is upheld by the tax of respect imposed upon the poor and the humble! If there were no inferiors to witness a man’s greatness, he would be great no more; and yet those who are the soil from which this moral grandness springs are left to rot, as if the more it approached to compost the ranker would be the tribute to his mightiness: so, without abating our horror of these men, we cannot altogether forget that the sufferers in most instances were cast away by Mammon to be in turn immolated to Mammon.

They had in short a bank—Heaven knows, not of “elegance”—upon which they could pass a draft when they chose; nor was it forged—they were themselves the drawers, and the money seemed to belong to no one; so careless at that time—it is, we hope, different now—was society of those whom it was bound to look after and protect. So money was again needed, and Burke was to pass the draft, because perhaps his companion thought that as there is (of course) honour among thieves, so fair play must be esteemed a jewel among manslayers. And here the strange circumstance occurred, in the midst of all these strange things, that his draft was to be endorsed by a constable. He had been among his dear friends in the Canongate,—and a man or a woman had now a value for him which a short time before he never dreamt of,—thinking of how he could make some of them more dear to him than they seemed to be to themselves, when his attention was directed to a poor unfortunate, steeped in poverty and drink, in the hands of a police officer. Mixing with the crowd, he went up to the officer, and, with much apparent sympathy, interfered for one who had no home and no friends to care for her. He would furnish that home, at least for a time, and be that friend. The poor woman, like some of the others who had wondered that they should become objects of interest, looked at him as one may be supposed to do who has considered herself past the hope of man’s charity. Some of the crowd, struck with the offer, backed the sympathiser, and the policeman, considering for a little, at last consented, giving her up to the kind friend,—no other than a philanthropist of the humbler order, but perhaps not the less sincere,—and enjoining upon him the due performance of his promise.

Having got his charge, the crowd—whose curiosity was served not less than its benevolence, for these poor people feel intensely for each other’s sorrows, the more by reason that no one else does—separated. Then, alas! the old story. The tempter and the victim pace the streets towards the block-altar of the sacrifice; and as they go, we may consider how many have achieved a world-wide notoriety for having concocted one of these acts, with the attending circumstances of having watched their opportunity and been defeated, and still kept to their purpose, and, veiling all in romantic mystery, at length effected their object. Such men, and their solitary performance, with which they were contented, or to which they were limited by the gallows, are only qualified to form a meagre episode to the terrible drama we are with so much imperfection evolving; even as Faust’s vision rose in curling smoke, and took on the gigantic form of a being out of nature and belonging to another world. We have heard of hardened men who gave those they intended to sacrifice time to pray. There was allowed only short shrift in Log’s lodgings. Before nightfall this woman lay doubled up in a tea-chest. We will not disturb you in your pause as your mind, led by her who dropped pity’s tear on the written words of the recording angel, goes away back to the youth or the maidenhood of this woman. The “perhaps” has a weakness in it, but who shall gainsay, with the doctrine of chances against him, that she was, as you may be, beautiful and good, yea, at one time looking forward to years of happiness, a redeemed’s death, and a Christian’s funeral, even with that confidence which—blessings on your pitiful heart!—will be sanctified and verified to you, because it is in God?

We are not done with the waifs even so far as known, and their number has never been recorded. It was a practice of Burke to wander out in the early mornings. He would have been seen pacing the solitude of the deserted streets even before cock-crow. Nor could any man tell the reason: it was not asked, not even speculated upon. Like the traces of sympathetic ink, the notice lay unverified, till the great disclosure, when it came up fresh into many minds. And it came up all at once, with the suspicion that he did not go those solitary rounds for contemplation, far less from remorse; a feeling which, so far as can be ascertained—for the pang of the wistful look of the dumb boy was suspected to be a mere trick of the prison confessional—never ruffled his pillow. The night-hawk goes to bed in the early morning, before the choir offer their song to the rising sun, and these catch no flies till he is far up in the heavens. The first surmise of the discovery of what had been doing in Log’s lodgings sprang the suspicion with elastic rapidity, that these early walks were undertaken in prosecution of the old purpose, and specially stimulated by an interest in that institution—to be found, we believe, nowhere else—the cinder-women;[8] not singing-birds these, if he was not a night-hawk; but the osprey is as early on the long sands, when there is not to be seen there a living thing, except the gulls, as they pace so securely the edge of the sea.

A very early riser in Edinburgh is impressed with the sight of these thin, haggard figures flitting from backet to backet in the great solitude. The only moving creatures in the long streets,—if you did not know they had any other object in view,—you would think that, being immured in the dark dens of the Old Town, and ashamed to shew their faces during the day, they crawl out to get a glimpse of their old haunts, where, as unfortunates, (the greater number,) they once flaunted their charms, till they faded to the point of recoil. You would say, too, that they belonged neither to this world nor any other—mere pendencies, with no solidity to keep them on the earth, and no wings to take them from it—hopeless, too, and fearless, not from despair or passion, but from sheer inanity—glimmers, not lights, flickering at the end of wicks, with no oil except what they have imbibed long before. It was this prey that brought the prowler out so early in the morning; and he might have revelled in a field so fruitful long enough, without that risk of discovery which attended his other assaults. Friendless as they are, with years intervening since they were cast off, not only from society, but from those who once knew them,—some worshippers of beauty, perhaps,—there were none to inquire after them, scarcely any to miss them, except a sister straggler, who might wonder for a moment why a shadow had disappeared.

That more of these creatures fell into his hands than the culprit confessed, was the general opinion of the time. One, at least, was certain, as a waif scarcely worthy of mention among so many cases, and these so much more éclatants. On that eventful morning he was more early than usual; the gray mists only as yet disappearing, and the figures he sought for looming as shadows here and there at long intervals. It was supposed to be in the New Town where he encountered the hopeless, soulless creature, scraping as usual in a dust-box, picking up the bits of cinders, and peering in the dim light for the chance turn-up of the sign of some servant’s lâcheté. A more easy approach than ever, with the charmed “dram” on his lips, sufficient to bring the light of hope once more to the cinder eyes. Even the long distance from the New Town, by the Mound and the Bow, to Log’s lodgings, as they paced and paced, would only increase the hope, to be gratified at the end. And of course it was gratified; so cheap a purchase, too, where the oil was all in the wick, and the blue glimmer, rendered for a short time white by a glass only once repeated, would recede into unconsciousness almost before the energy to take advantage of it was up in arms. While this work was doing, in which the accomplice rose from his sleep to join, the women were in bed—saved in this instance from the trouble of their delicacy in going into another room, or the passage, as they sometimes did. Nay, the cock had not crowed before all was over. The gurgling sound would be weak. It has been said that the death-scream of the surprised sinner, and the dying prayer of the Christian, are the extremes which terminate two courses of life. They may be the last signs in this world and the first in the next, as they are the farewell to time or the salutation to eternity. Who was there to care?

The Relative.

So far we have had details through the medium of confessions uttered when the only terriculumentum to be feared by those who had no belief in a hereafter—the law—had given forth her decree of death, supplemented as these were by collateral testimony, or, rather, desultory remarks of others who had seen portions of the drama; but in some instances there were thrown across the light which at last illuminated the mystery, certain shadows with no defined forms, and through which the light shone only to make them lurid.

Of this kind of partially-revealed secrets was the story of the young cousin. No name or personal marks or place of origin ever came to the public ear, far less the form or features of the sacrificed; only, and no more, that a cousin of Helen M‘Dougal’s,—by uncle or aunt uncertain,—left her mother and sister,—from whence, also under the gnome,—to visit her relative in Edinburgh. It was known that she entered under the door-lintel of Log’s lodgings, and was never seen again. If the world, as a spasmodic poet tells us, were destroyed, a few atoms left of the wreck, with their internal forces of attraction and repulsion, would enable a philosopher to tell how it was made. We smile at the extravagance, while we acknowledge some kind of truth, which we cannot understand. These small traces of the little world of crime within the back room “with the window looking out on the dead wall,” long since destroyed and erased from the bigger world of which it formed a part and the shame, may be brought together and filled up by the imagination, with a certainty so far removed from the feeling of fiction, that we might scarcely regret the want of particulars. We have had small need of that faculty in our history; yet, comparatively, of that little world we know next to nothing. We might as well deny to the welcomed cousin a name and a place of birth, as refuse to believe that she went into that house with the expectation of meeting friendship, if not love, to a greater degree than what was held out to the hope of others. They would shake hands with her—(what love and hypocrisy don’t?)—and there would be inquiries after the mother, and the sister too;—just what takes place at all such meetings. Nor are we to forget the welcome in the still more common shape, not the fatted calf, but the bottle of whisky, so useful an auxiliary there. If the paramour or husband of her cousin ever sung his sentimental airs, he would surely not refuse on the occasion of a visit of one allied to him in the bonds of affinity. There could not help being joy, for it was through the light of the feeling of mirth that these eight eyes looked on the guest they were making happy. Those who have read the German tale of the two eyes which followed everywhere Hans Kauffmann, and never glared upon him but when he was alone in the dark, and which at an after-period he saw shining in the face of his enemy, as that enemy, the wreaker of vengeance, stood over him with the thirsty sword, may trace a resemblance; but as for these eyes of the four hosts looking anger on the poor relative, we may safely place that among the impossibilities—and surely we do that more easily than we can fancy the expression of that peculiar welcome.

We wonder how nature so often leaves us in the dark. We cannot understand that she has so much to do that she is for ever in a hurry, so that we only see at times the skirt of her cloak. Then we are ourselves so restless and impatient for knowledge, that we snuff the candle of our inquiry so often that we can see nothing. Perhaps all this is intended for the purpose of giving us a wider world of imagination, and more ardour in peopling it with all its strange beings, spectral images, protean forms, wild movements—for what further end we know not, but we work our privilege in these days of fiction very well. The veil is often an exaggerator, but in this act of our drama it seems hard to fill up the unknown recesses with possibilities equal to the realities. Just try to supply the required minutiæ to the few words said to have been uttered by Helen M‘Dougal. After many months of fruitless inquiry, met with a denial that any one in Log’s lodgings had seen the young cousin, the mother and sister, probably under suspicion of some foul play, went to the house of Constantine Burke, the brother of our man. Helen M‘Dougal happened to be present, and to the request again made to know what had become of the girl, the woman, who must have been under the influence of drink, for at this time the explosion had not taken place, answered, “Oh, you need not trouble yourselves about Jessy. She was murdered, and sold long ago.”

Among the cases of mere outline and shadowy traces, suspected to have been more in number, as including more waifs than admitted, we may place another. It seems to have been a bargain between the two principal actors that their work should be conjunct in action as well as in payment. On one occasion, Burke, having now plenty of money, went to the country on a pleasure jaunt. Yes; pleasure. Amidst all our philosophy and inquiry into causes and motives, would we not save ourselves a deal of trouble by attributing nine-tenths of the actions of men, not excepting murder, to a desire for pleasure? All swallow the love-apple bait presented by some wicked genius of the devil, who sports with the affections of mankind. The beguiler laughs as he angles. Some victims afford him fine “rises,” and look shy, only to come again to bite in earnest. Some swallow and enjoy the sweet morsel, until the hook approaches the pylorus of their reason. Some disgorge it, to seek it again; others break the line and run away with the hook, to die in secret places under a crag. Some are caught by a fin, and carry the mark of the forbidden pleasure only to excite them to another trial; others are held on till they reach the bank, where they writhe in agony amidst sunbeams, wild thyme, and gaudy flowers, with the laugh of the tempter sounding in their ears. And some, on being swung ashore, get entangled in a tree, and hang there by the neck. How few can nibble off cunningly the cibum præfixum ære, and avoid the snare! Burke had gone on a pleasure jaunt—not to be hooked yet. On his return he found Log’s lodgings as he left them; nor did he suspect that any of the unholy work had been performed in his absence. If the old orgies had been continued,—and how could they now be renounced when the increasing weight of all those deeds must have been pressing more and more on their hearts, however they might try to conceal it, and required the old art of buoyancy as a counter-agent?—there had been plenty of money to supply the means, so that Burke thought that no march had been stolen upon him by his cunning colleague. It happened, however, that he had occasion soon after his return to call at the hall in Surgeon’s Square—perhaps to get the price, or part of it, of the last burden. He was there told by one of the assistants that his friend had been there shortly before with a box, not empty, and had been paid for it. He even got the day of the month and the hour of the evening, from which he saw that his co-actor had been secretly, as he said, working during his absence “on his own hook.” Enraged at this want of honour, he repaired to the house, where he found his friend, and taxed him with the fraud. Hare stoutly denied the charge. The women were appealed to, but neither of them would admit anything; for we are to remember that both of them were not only in fear of their respective lords, but of those of each other. Nay, we have seen Hare using as much liberty of punishing M‘Dougal when his friend was present, as Burke had of thrashing Mrs Hare, which it is certain he often did. Nay, the women even had their battles royal, and the men were, as well, often engaged in fierce conflict. The present subject was a delicate one. It touched the honour of contractors, the purse of sordidness, and the faith of friendship. Well, we verily believe that even Burke was fit for these heroics, and he was fit for something else. He fell upon his friend with fury, and Hare, ever ready for battle with all and sundry, not excepting his wife, retaliated. They fought long and desperately, the women looking on with only that concern which might find its account in so being revenged for some prior cruelty exercised toward them by one or the other, perhaps both. This was one of those riots which so much disturbed the neighbours. A crowd, as usual, collected at the door, but even the exasperation of the parties could not force out the secret of their quarrel. It would have been strange indeed if it had! and we say this even in the midst of daily examples of anger roused to a pitch of opening the floodgates of very dark things, even to the confusion and ruin of the angry, and so far involuntary, confessor. How little did that crowd of spectators know what these men were fighting about!

But if the subject was the price of a human body, whose spirit was it that enlivened it—man or woman, young or old, good or evil? The creature passed away in the middle of a large city renowned for civilisation, and even with the tread of passers-by reaching the scene, more secretly than one who perishes at sea; for, in that case, though there is none to see, there are always some to draw a conclusion. Yet, withal, we cannot say that Providence does not vindicate the importance of its creatures. That victim would, for certain, be mourned somewhere. There are even notes of woe in the grove, when the missing mate is snared by the fowler, though no one may be there to hear. It was remarked at the time when the great secret burst, and the news flew on the back of broadsheets throughout the land, that there were scarcely any direct declarations of claims. Even when conviction was heavy on the heart that a missing relative could in a certain way be accounted for, the issues were spasmed, and people only looked their thoughts. If the whisper passed, it was only among close relatives, and they kept the secret to themselves, even to the exclusion of friends. It was from this cause that the papers could not, with all their efforts, pander to the curiosity of the public by giving names. Nay, so awe-struck was that public itself, that, after the first excitement and wonder, and after Burke had paid the penalty, there seemed a wish to hurry away from both the subject and its details. They wanted back to their natural feelings and sympathies; and the hurriedness with which the crimes were laid past, with the resolution that they should not be mentioned, seemed to hold some ratio to their gigantic proportions. But the reasons which actuated the people of the time are not these by which posterity is to be influenced; for vice, whatever may be its degree, must ever be the foil of goodness, and the punishment of the wicked the sanction of virtue. It was even said by one of the newspapers of the day, that these records would at some future time form the materials out of which some Sir Walter would weave a romance. The prophecy is not justified in us. The romance-writer will come; at present, we are content with the office of chronicler.

How much we could wish that these things had never been left to us to chronicle, and how much too that what we have already said were the worst we have to say! But thus begun, it behoved that the obstinacy of these men should harden more and more; that the recklessness increased by success should, according to rule, get more and more regardless of danger, till the delirium of wickedness should throw them into the hands of justice. Already “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.”