Inscrutable indeed in the case to which the words were applied--no other
than an instance of death by starvation, which occurred in Edinburgh in
the year we have just mentioned. In that retreat of poverty called
Middleton's Entry, which joins the dark street called the Potterrow, and
Bristo Street, the inhabitants were roused into surprise, if not a
feeling approaching to horror, by the discovery that a woman, who had
lived for a period of fifteen years in a solitary room at the top of one
of the tenements, had been found in bed dead. A doctor was called, but
before he came it was concluded by those who had assembled in the small
room that she had died from want of food; and such was the fact. The
body--that of one not yet much past the middle of life, and with fair
complexion and comely features--was so emaciated, that you might have
counted the ribs merely by the eye; and all those parts where the bones
are naturally near the surface exhibited a sharpness which suggested the
fancy, that as you may see a phosphorescent skeleton through the glow,
you beheld in the candle-light the figure of death under the thin
covering of the bones. She realized, in short, the description which
doctors give of the appearance of those unfortunate beings who die of
what is technically called _atrophia familicorum_--that Nemesis of
civilisation which points scornfully to the victim of want, and then
looks round on God's bountiful table, set for the meanest of his
creatures. So we may indite; but rhetoric, which is useless where the
images cannot rise to the dignity or descend to the humiliation of the
visible fact, must always come short of the effect of the plain words
that a human creature--perhaps good and amiable and delicate to that
shyness which cannot complain--has died in the very midst of a
proclaimed philanthropy, and within the limits of a space comprehending
smoking tables covered with luxuries, and surrounded by Christian men
and women filled with meat and drink to repletion and satiety.