Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 105.djvu/97

88 by the mystery which invested the murders; mystery as to various points, but especially as respected one important question, Had the murderer any accomplice? If the appendix to the jeu d'esprit itself may be thought "too diffuse," we find a touching excuse in die writer's assurance: "Feeling this at the very time of writing, I was yet unable to correct it; so little self-control was I able to exercise under the afflicting agitations, and the unconquerable impatience of my nervous malady." Its grave tone comes with basso relievo effect after the droll details of the Lecture itself—a lecture read before a Society for the Encouragement of Murder, or, according to their own delicate euphemism, The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder—the members of which profess to be "curious in homicide; amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of bloodshed; and, in short, Murder-Fanciers"—who meet and criticise (as they would a picture, statue, or other work of art) every fresh atrocity of that class which the police annals of Europe bring up. The lecturer argues, that when indeed a murder is in the paulo-post-futurum tense—not done, not even (according to modern purism) being done, but only going to be done—and a rumour of it comes to our ears, we are then by all means to treat it morally. "But," he continues, "suppose it over and done, and that you can say of it,, It is finished, or (in that adamantine molossus of Medea) , Done it is: it is a fait accompli; suppose the poor murdered man to be out of his pain, and the rascal that did it off like a shot, nobody knows whither; suppose, lastly, that we have done our best, by putting out our legs, to trip up the fellow in his flight, but all to no purpose—'abiit, evasit, excessit, erupit," &c., why, then, I say, what's the use of any more virtue? Enough has been given to morality; now comes the turn of Taste and the Fine Arts. A sad thing it was, no doubt, very sad; but we can't mend it. Therefore let us make the best of a bad matter; and, as it is impossible to hammer anything out of it for moral purposes, let us treat it æsthetically, and see if it will turn to account in that way. Such is the logic of a sensible man, and what follows? We dry up our tears, and have the satisfaction, perhaps, to discover that a transaction, which, morally considered, was shocking, and without a leg to stand upon, when tried by principles of Taste, turns out to be a very meritorious performance. … Virtue has had her day; and henceforward. Virtu, so nearly the same thing as to differ only by a single letter (which surely is not worth haggling or higgling about)—Virtu, I repeat, and Connoisseurship, have leave to provide for themselves." Upon which principle the lecturer, at once virtuous and virtuoso, proceeds to guide the studies of his hearers, "from Cain to Mr. Thurtell"—adorning his progress with rich and curious exemplifications, illustrations, and quotations, from Milton the poet and Richardson the painter, Spinosa and Hobbes, Malebranche and Berkeley, Leibnitz and Kant, olden wise saws and modern instances. On the whole, this lecture may be pronounced unique in universal literature; and probably one man alone, of the living or the dead, could or would have written it—himself being as unique as this bit of æsthetico-grotesque.

Political economy is a study to which the English Opium-eater did seriously incline, more than forty years since. And in those days when he was Opium-eater in fact, and not yet by name, the perusal of Ricardo it was to which he alludes in the "Confessions," when he says: "For nearly two years I believe that I read no book but one; and I owe it to