so break it? Such is not fiction--its simple baby logic answers for
it--but we say as to the child's query, We cannot answer you. Many a
great and noble heart recognises the minister of justice, as God's own
delegate, to claim the yielding up of his Creature's life, a satisfaction
to the broken laws of God and man. Many as great and noble, and we would
think as mindful of the great ends of justice and design of punishment,
would say, Leave the gift of God, the breath of life, at His disposal,
who has said, "Vengeance is mine;"--trust to _His justice_ as to _His
mercy_, to which alone you appeal, when sending the soul into his
presence, reeking with guilt and sin. As spoke the child, on that sad,
solemn day of darkness,--when the spirit of sin seemed to breathe over
the debased city, and spread its contaminations through every channel
where its subtle essence could find an inlet, till the moral vision of
the very purest seemed to be obscured, and the atmosphere tainted for a
while, by the sickening familiarity with the face of crime;--the last day
of the wretched victim of unrestrained passions in life and in
death,--whose struggles of vanity and egotism, with the quailings of the
flesh, evidenced by the whitening hair, the trembling hand, and vapid
mutterings, through a trial prolonged to an unheard-of length, had drawn
around him a host of witnesses, almost without a parallel in history; and
not alone of the mass of unlearned and ignorant, whom we are wont to
charge with insensibility and coarseness, nor of the stern philosopher,
nor even sickly religionists, who find some concealed duty in witnessing
elaborations of torture, but of the gentle hearts that move within the
mothers and daughters of England; and white-gloved and richly-dressed
ladies thronged to use the tickets that gained them privileged entrance
to a gallery that overlooked this spectacle of human agony--(oh! is there
one among that assembled galaxy of England's fair ones that can recal
that scene, without a shudder and a blush for the very refinements that
cast their cloak around the horrors of the reality?)--that day,--when the
festivities of concert and party over, when the merriment of the
bustling, noisy fair outside the court of trial had died away, and room
was left for the last act of the drama--as then, the child lifted up its
saddened voice, with its question so quaintly simple--so was it echoed
back to us from the grave of that poor criminal,