consider it applicable to him who, for an unlawful love of native
country, was to undergo a violent and disgraceful death.

This, to be sure, might be attributed to the feeling that so many good
regular people have, that it is highly blameable to pity any man who
suffers capitally for a breach of the law; that it would be, in some
sort, to question the justice of the laws themselves. And the ten or
a dozen honest souls that formed the company were probably so good
themselves as to be justly scandalized at the notion of holding so much
communion with guilt, as to sympathize with it in its sufferings. But
I believe, after all, it was rather a flow of idiom than an effort of
principle.

Mr. Small, a farmer, well to do in ----shire, fell ill of an acute and
dangerous disorder. (By the by, every one was anxious to know if "poor"
Mrs. Small's husband was better.) He died,--Mrs. Small was, of course,
in decent affliction. But the word of pity was always transferred from
the principal sufferer to her, till he was beyond suffering. Then first
it was bestowed on the "poor" corpse, which every one came to visit, and
flattered as looking "pleasant."

Mrs. Small herself, in the first letter of her widowhood, addressed to
an intimate female friend, did not make a more judicious application of
the favourite epithet. To this friend it was her habit to write once
a quarter. We insert three passages; one extracted from each of these
quarterly epistles, which followed in due succession after her sad
bereavement:--

"Dear Nelly,--My brother-in-law has given the direction of the funeral
to a good economical undertaker, by name Peebles. I have not seen him,