face of this century. Such cases, indeed, as that of Miss Bland, or of
Captain Donnellan, and Sir Theophilus Boughton, shall never have any
countenance from me. Fie on these dealers in poison, say I: can they not
keep to the old honest way of cutting throats, without introducing such
abominable innovations from Italy? I consider all these poisoning cases,
compared with the legitimate style, as no better than wax-work by the side
of sculpture, or a lithographic print by the side of a fine Volpato. But,
dismissing these, there remain many excellent works of art in a pure style,
such as nobody need be ashamed to own, as every candid connoisseur will
admit. _Candid_, observe, I say; for great allowances must be made in
these cases; no artist can ever be sure of carrying through his own fine
preconception. Awkward disturbances will arise; people will not submit to
have their throats cut quietly; they will run, they will kick, they will
bite; and whilst the portrait painter often has to complain of too much
torpor in his subject, the artist, in our line, is generally embarrassed by
too much animation. At the same time, however disagreeable to the artist,
this tendency in murder to excite and irritate the subject, is certainly
one of its advantages to the world in general, which we ought not to
overlook, since it favors the development of latent talent. Jeremy Taylor
notices with admiration, the extraordinary leaps which people will take
under the influence of fear. There was a striking instance of this in the
recent case of the M'Keands; the boy cleared a height, such as he will
never clear again to his dying day. Talents also of the most brilliant
description for thumping, and indeed for all the gymnastic exercises,
have sometimes been developed by the panic which accompanies our artists;
talents else buried and hid under a bushel to the possessors, as much as to
their friends. I remember an interesting illustration of this fact, in a
case which I learned in Germany.

Riding one day in the neighborhood of Munich, I overtook a distinguished