Part 2 (1/2)
”And yet it may be called in some sort a strong heart, and a high heart,”
rejoined the advocate. ”You see I can put you both out of heart.”
”I have played all my hearts,” said the younger gentleman.
”Then we'll have another lead,” answered his companion.--”And as to the old and condemned Tolbooth, what pity the same honour cannot be done to it as has been done to many of its inmates. Why should not the Tolbooth have its 'Last Speech, Confession, and Dying Words?' The old stones would be just as conscious of the honour as many a poor devil who has dangled like a ta.s.sel at the west end of it, while the hawkers were shouting a confession the culprit had never heard of.”
”I am afraid,” said I, ”if I might presume to give my opinion, it would be a tale of unvaried sorrow and guilt.”
”Not entirely, my friend,” said Hardie; ”a prison is a world within itself, and has its own business, griefs, and joys, peculiar to its circle. Its inmates are sometimes short-lived, but so are soldiers on service; they are poor relatively to the world without, but there are degrees of wealth and poverty among them, and so some are relatively rich also. They cannot stir abroad, but neither can the garrison of a besieged fort, or the crew of a s.h.i.+p at sea; and they are not under a dispensation quite so desperate as either, for they may have as much food as they have money to buy, and are not obliged to work, whether they have food or not.”
”But what variety of incident,” said I (not without a secret view to my present task), ”could possibly be derived from such a work as you are pleased to talk of?”
”Infinite,” replied the young advocate. ”Whatever of guilt, crime, imposture, folly, unheard-of misfortunes, and unlooked-for change of fortune, can be found to chequer life, my Last Speech of the Tolbooth should ill.u.s.trate with examples sufficient to gorge even the public's all-devouring appet.i.te for the wonderful and horrible. The inventor of fict.i.tious narratives has to rack his brains for means to diversify his tale, and after all can hardly hit upon characters or incidents which have not been used again and again, until they are familiar to the eye of the reader, so that the development, _enle'vement,_ the desperate wound of which the hero never dies, the burning fever from which the heroine is sure to recover, become a mere matter of course. I join with my honest friend Crabbe, and have an unlucky propensity to hope, when hope is lost, and to rely upon the cork-jacket, which carries the heroes of romance safe through all the billows of affliction.” He then declaimed the following pa.s.sage, rather with too much than too little emphasis:--
Much have I feared, but am no more afraid, When some chaste beauty by some wretch betrayed, Is drawn away with such distracted speed, That she antic.i.p.ates a dreadful deed.
Not so do I--Let solid walls impound The captive fair, and dig a moat around; Let there be brazen locks and bars of steel, And keepers cruel, such as never feel; With not a single note the purse supply, And when she begs, let men and maids deny; Be windows there from which she dare not fall, And help so distant, 'tis in vain to call; Still means of freedom will some Power devise, And from the baffled ruffian s.n.a.t.c.h his prize.
”The end of uncertainty,” he concluded, ”is the death of interest; and hence it happens that no one now reads novels.”
”Hear him, ye G.o.ds!” returned his companion. ”I a.s.sure you, Mr.
Pattieson, you will hardly visit this learned gentleman, but you are likely to find the new novel most in repute lying on his table,--snugly intrenched, however, beneath Stair's Inst.i.tutes, or an open volume of Morrison's Decisions.”
”Do I deny it?” said the hopeful jurisconsult, ”or wherefore should I, since it is well known these Delilahs seduce my wisers and my betters?
May they not be found lurking amidst the multiplied memorials of our most distinguished counsel, and even peeping from under the cus.h.i.+on of a judge's arm-chair? Our seniors at the bar, within the bar, and even on the bench, read novels; and, if not belied, some of them have written novels into the bargain. I only say, that I read from habit and from indolence, not from real interest; that, like ancient Pistol devouring his leek, I read and swear till I get to the end of the narrative. But not so in the real records of human vagaries--not so in the State Trials, or in the Books of Adjournal, where every now and then you read new pages of the human heart, and turns of fortune far beyond what the boldest novelist ever attempted to produce from the coinage of his brain.”
”And for such narratives,” I asked, ”you suppose the History of the Prison of Edinburgh might afford appropriate materials?”
”In a degree unusually ample, my dear sir,” said Hardie--”Fill your gla.s.s, however, in the meanwhile. Was it not for many years the place in which the Scottish parliament met? Was it not James's place of refuge, when the mob, inflamed by a seditious preacher, broke, forth, on him with the cries of 'The sword of the Lord and of Gideon--bring forth the wicked Haman?' Since that time how many hearts have throbbed within these walls, as the tolling of the neighbouring bell announced to them how fast the sands of their life were ebbing; how many must have sunk at the sound--how many were supported by stubborn pride and dogged resolution--how many by the consolations of religion? Have there not been some, who, looking back on the motives of their crimes, were scarce able to understand how they should have had such temptation as to seduce them from virtue; and have there not, perhaps, been others, who, sensible of their innocence, were divided between indignation at the undeserved doom which they were to undergo, consciousness that they had not deserved it, and racking anxiety to discover some way in which they might yet vindicate themselves? Do you suppose any of these deep, powerful, and agitating feelings, can be recorded and perused without exciting a corresponding depth of deep, powerful, and agitating interest?--Oh! do but wait till I publish the _Causes Ce'le'bres_ of Caledonia, and you will find no want of a novel or a tragedy for some time to come. The true thing will triumph over the brightest inventions of the most ardent imagination. _Magna est veritas, et praevalebit._”
”I have understood,” said I, encouraged by the affability of my rattling entertainer, ”that less of this interest must attach to Scottish jurisprudence than to that of any other country. The general morality of our people, their sober and prudent habits”--
”Secure them,” said the barrister, ”against any great increase of professional thieves and depredators, but not against wild and wayward starts of fancy and pa.s.sion, producing crimes of an extraordinary description, which are precisely those to the detail of which we listen with thrilling interest. England has been much longer a highly civilised country; her subjects have been very strictly amenable to laws administered without fear or favour, a complete division of labour has taken place among her subjects, and the very thieves and robbers form a distinct cla.s.s in society, subdivided among themselves according to the subject of the depredations, and the mode in which they carry them on, acting upon regular habits and principles, which can be calculated and antic.i.p.ated at Bow Street, Hatton Garden, or the Old Bailey. Our sister kingdom is like a cultivated field,--the farmer expects that, in spite of all his care, a certain number of weeds will rise with the corn, and can tell you beforehand their names and appearance. But Scotland is like one of her own Highland glens, and the moralist who reads the records of her criminal jurisprudence, will find as many curious anomalous facts in the history of mind, as the botanist will detect rare specimens among her dingles and cliffs.”
”And that's all the good you have obtained from three perusals of the Commentaries on Scottish Criminal Jurisprudence?” said his companion. ”I suppose the learned author very little thinks that the facts which his erudition and acuteness have acc.u.mulated for the ill.u.s.tration of legal doctrines, might be so arranged as to form a sort of appendix to the half-bound and slip-shod volumes of the circulating library.”
”I'll bet you a pint of claret,” said the elder lawyer, ”that he will not feel sore at the comparison. But as we say at the bar, 'I beg I may not be interrupted;' I have much more to say, upon my Scottish collection of _Causes Ce'le'bres._ You will please recollect the scope and motive given for the contrivance and execution of many extraordinary and daring crimes, by the long civil dissensions of Scotland--by the hereditary jurisdictions, which, until 1748, rested the investigation of crises in judges, ignorant, partial, or interested--by the habits of the gentry, shut up in their distant and solitary mansion-houses, nursing their revengeful Pa.s.sions just to keep their blood from stagnating--not to mention that amiable national qualification, called the _perfervidum ingenium Scotorum,_ which our lawyers join in alleging as a reason for the severity of some of our enactments. When I come to treat of matters so mysterious, deep, and dangerous, as these circ.u.mstances have given rise to, the blood of each reader shall be curdled, and his epidermis crisped into goose skin.--But, hist!--here comes the landlord, with tidings, I suppose, that the chaise is ready.”
It was no such thing--the tidings bore, that no chaise could be had that evening, for Sir Peter Plyem had carried forward my landlord's two pairs of horses that morning to the ancient royal borough of Bubbleburgh, to look after his interest there. But as Bubbleburgh is only one of a set of five boroughs which club their shares for a member of parliament, Sir Peter's adversary had judiciously watched his departure, in order to commence a canva.s.s in the no less royal borough of Bitem, which, as all the world knows, lies at the very termination of Sir Peter's avenue, and has been held in leading-strings by him and his ancestors for time immemorial. Now Sir Peter was thus placed in the situation of an ambitious monarch, who, after having commenced a daring inroad into his enemy's territories, is suddenly recalled by an invasion of his own hereditary dominions. He was obliged in consequence to return from the half-won borough of Bubbleburgh, to look after the half-lost borough of Bitem, and the two pairs of horses which had carried him that morning to Bubbleburgh were now forcibly detained to transport him, his agent, his valet, his jester, and his hard-drinker, across the country to Bitem. The cause of this detention, which to me was of as little consequence as it may be to the reader, was important enough to my companions to reconcile them to the delay. Like eagles, they smelled the battle afar off, ordered a magnum of claret and beds at the Wallace, and entered at full career into the Bubbleburgh and Bitem politics, with all the probable ”Pet.i.tions and complaints” to which they were likely to give rise.
In the midst of an anxious, animated, and, to me, most unintelligible discussion, concerning provosts, bailies, deacons, sets of boroughs, leets, town-clerks, burgesses resident and non-resident, all of a sudden the lawyer recollected himself. ”Poor Dunover, we must not forget him;”
and the landlord was despatched in quest of the _pauvre honteux,_ with an earnestly civil invitation to him for the rest of the evening. I could not help asking the young gentlemen if they knew the history of this poor man; and the counsellor applied himself to his pocket to recover the memorial or brief from which he had stated his cause.
”He has been a candidate for our _remedium miserabile,_” said Mr. Hardie, ”commonly called a _cess...o...b..norum._ As there are divines who have doubted the eternity of future punishments, so the Scotch lawyers seem to have thought that the crime of poverty might be atoned for by something short of perpetual imprisonment. After a month's confinement, you must know, a prisoner for debt is ent.i.tled, on a sufficient statement to our Supreme Court, setting forth the amount of his funds, and the nature of his misfortunes, and surrendering all his effects to his creditors, to claim to be discharged from prison.”
”I had heard,” I replied, ”of such a humane regulation.”
”Yes,” said Halkit, ”and the beauty of it is, as the foreign fellow said, you may get the _cessio,_ when the _bonorums_ are all spent--But what, are you puzzling in your pockets to seek your only memorial among old play-bills, letters requesting a meeting of the Faculty, rules of the Speculative Society,* syllabus' of lectures--all the miscellaneous contents of a young advocate's pocket, which contains everything but briefs and bank-notes?