Nuts and Nutcrackers. Lever Charles James

converts right into wrong and wrong into right, who shrouds the guilty man, and conceals the murderer, with honour, and praise, and rank, and riches, and who does this for a brief marked fifty pounds, yet have nothing but abhorrence and detestation for the impassive agent whose fee is but one. One can help what he does – the other cannot. One is an amateur – the other practices in spite of himself. One employs every energy of his mind and every faculty of his intellect – the other only devotes the ingenuity of his fingers. One strains every nerve to let loose a criminal upon the world – the other but closes the grave over guilt and crime!

      The king’s counsel is courted. His society sought for. He is held in high esteem, and while his present career is a brilliant one in the vista before him, his eyes are fixed upon the ermine. Jack Ketch, on the other hand, is shunned. His companionship avoided, and the only futurity he can look to, is a life of ignominy, and after it an unknown grave. Let him be a man of fascinating manners, highly gifted, and agreeable; let him be able to recount with the most melting pathos the anecdotes and incidents of his professional career, throwing light upon the history of his own period – such as none but himself could throw; – let him speak of the various characters that have passed through his hands, and so to say, “dropped off before him” – yet the prejudice of the world is an obstacle not to be overcome; his calling is in disrepute, and no personal efforts of his own, no individual preeminence he may arrive at in his walk, will ever redeem it. Other men’s estimation increases as they distinguish themselves in life; each fresh display of their abilities, each new occasion for the exercise of their powers, is hailed with renewed favour and increasing flattery; not so he, – every time he appears on his peculiar stage, the disgust and detestation is but augmented, —vires acquirit eundo, – his countenance, as it becomes known, is a signal for the yelling execrations of a mob, and the very dexterity with which he performs his functions, is made matter of loathing and horror. Were his duties such as might be carried on in secret, he might do good by stealth and blush to find it fame; but no, his attributes demand the noon-day and the multitude – the tragedy he performs in, must be played before tens of thousands, by whom his every look is scowled at, his every gesture scrutinized. But to conclude, – this man is a necessity of our social system. We want him – we require, him, and we can’t do without him. Much of the machinery of a trial might be dispensed with or retrenched. His office, however, has nothing superfluous. He is part of the machinery of our civilisation, and on what principle do we hunt him down like a wild beast to his lair?

      Men of rank and title are daily to be found in association, and even intimacy with black legs and bruisers, grooms, jockeys, and swindlers; yet we never heard that even the Whigs paid any attention to a hangman, nor is his name to be found even in the list of a Radical viceroy’s levee. However, we do not despair. Many prejudices of this nature have already given way, and many absurd notions have been knocked on the head by a wag of great Daniel’s tail. And if our friend of Newgate, who is certainly anti-union in his functions, will only cry out for Repeal, the justice that is entreated for all Ireland may include him in the general distribution of its favours. Poor Theodore Hook used to say, that marriage was like hanging, there being only the difference of an aspirate between halter and altar.

      A NUT FOR “ENDURING AFFECTION.”

      My dear reader, if it does not insult your understanding by the self-evidence of the query, will you allow me to ask you a question – which of the two is more culpable, the man who, finding himself in a path of dereliction, arrests himself in his downward career, and, by a wonderful effort of self-restraint, stops dead short, and will suffer no inducement, no seduction, to lead him one step further; or he, who, floating down the stream of his own vicious passions, takes the flood-tide of iniquity, and, indifferent to every consequence, deaf to all remonstrance, seeks but the indulgence of his own egotistical pleasure with a stern determination to pursue it to the last? Of course you will say, that he who repents is better than he who persists; there is hope for the one, there is none for the other. Yet would you believe it, our common law asserts directly the reverse, pronouncing the culpability of the former as meriting heavy punishment, while the latter is not assailable even by implication.

      That I may make myself more clear, I shall give an instance of my meaning. Scarcely a week passes over without a trial for breach of promise of marriage. Sometimes the gay Lothario, to use the phrase of the newspapers, is nineteen, sometimes ninety. In either case his conduct is a frightful tissue of perjured vows and base deception. His innumerable letters breathing all the tenderness of affectionate solicitude, intended but for the eyes of her he loves, are read in open court; attested copies are shown to the judge, or handed up to the jury-box. The course of his true love is traced from the bubbling fountain of first acquaintance to the broad river of his passionate devotion. Its rapids and its whirlpools, its placid lakes, its frothy torrents, its windings and its turnings, its ebbs and flows, are discussed, detailed, and descanted on with all the hacknied precision of the craft, as though his heart was a bill of exchange, or the current of his affection a disputed mill-stream. And what, after all, is this man’s crime? knowing that love is the great humanizer of our race, and feeling probably how much he stands in need of some civilizing process, he attaches himself to some lovely and attractive girl, who, in the reciprocity of her affection, is herself benefited in a degree equal to him. If the soft solicitude of the tender passion, if its ennobling self-respect, if its purifying influence on the heart, be good for the man, how much more so is it for the woman. If he be taught to feel how the refined enjoyments of an attractive girl’s mind are superior to the base and degenerate pursuits of every-day pleasure, how much more will she learn to prize and cultivate those gifts which form the charm of her nature, and breathe an incense of fascination around her steps. Here is a compact where both parties benefit, but that they may do so to the fullest extent, it is necessary that no self-interest, no mean prospect of individual advantage, should interfere: all must be pure and confiding. Love-making should not be like a game of écarté with a black leg, where you must not rise from the table till you are ruined. No! it should rather resemble a party at picquet with your pretty cousin, when the moment either party is tired, you may throw down the cards and abandon the game.

      This, then, is the case of the man; he either discovers that on further acquaintance the qualities he believed in were not so palpable as he thought, or, if there, marred in their exercise by opposing and antagonist forces, of whose existence he knew not, he thinks he detects discrepancies of temperament, disparities of taste; he foresees that in the channel where he looked for deep water there are so many rocks, and shoals, and quicksands, that he fears the bark of conjugal happiness may be shipwrecked upon them; and like a prudent mariner, he resolves to lighten the craft by “throwing over the lady.” Had this man married with all these impending suspicions on his mind, there is little doubt he would have made a most execrable husband; not to mention the danger that his wife should not be all amiable as she ought. He stops short – that is, he explains in one, perhaps in a series of letters, the reasons of his new course.

      He expects in return the admiration and esteem of her, for whose happiness he is legislating, as well as for his own; and oh, base ingratitude! he receives a letter from her attorney. The gentlemen of the long robe – newspaper again – are in ecstasies. Like devils on the arrival of a new soul, they brighten up, rub their hands, and congratulate each other on a glorious case. The damages are laid at five thousand pounds; and, as the lady is pretty, and can be seen from the jury-box, being fathers themselves, they award every sixpence of the money.

      I can picture to myself the feeling of the defendant at such a moment as this. As he stands alone in conscious honesty, ruminating on his fate – alone, I say, for, like Mahomet’s coffin, he has no resting-place; laughed at by the men, sneered at by the women, mulcted of perhaps half his fortune, merely because for the last three years of his life he represented himself in every amiable and attractive trait that can grace and adorn human nature. Who would wonder, if, like the man in the farce, he would register a vow never to do a good-natured thing again as long as he lives; or what respect can he have for a government or a country, where the church tells him to love his neighbour, and the chief justice makes him pay five thousand for his obedience.

      I now come to the other case, and I shall be very brief in my observations. I mean that of him, who equally fond of flirting as the former, has yet a lively fear of an action at law. Love-making