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Lassé d'imiter l'aigle altier
Elle reprend son doux métier:

Bacchus m'appelle, et je rentre au quartier,
Adieu donc, pauvre gloire!

Deshéritons l'histoire;

Venez, amours et versez nous à boire.

In all the songs of De Beranger, we recognise a man who feels what he writes—who understands what he is speaking of, and who speaks of it in a way to make it understood by every one. In some of his songs, passages have been pointed out which are not exempt from indelicacy. This is a blemish which we do not seek to excuse, because, before him, Molière and La Fontaine have given sad examples of the same fault. But it is very rare-and, excepting the song of la Bacchante, which caused De Beranger to be accused before the tribunal of Correctional police, we could scarcely cite more than two or three, in which there is any real offence against propriety.

The songs of Beranger do not all deserve the title of odes which Benjamin Constant has given them. In several of them, there are faults of style, incorrect rhymes, inversions, and sometimes constraint of language. But these faults are not of a nature to become contagious-while the numberless beauties we find in Beranger may tend to produce them in others, and to fertilize the genius of his successors. No one has possessed, to the same extent with himself, that admirable art of creating a frame-work-a scene, a reality, and a reason-for his subject of inventing an action, and rendering it in a dramatic manner. Thus, through all the careless gaiety which breaks out in the light and frivolous song, les Gueux, and in that entitled le Nouveau Diogène, we can trace that contemplative spirit, which while it makes us laugh at others, finds means of giving a lesson to those who really listen.

If Beranger had chosen to support men in power, he would, as well as several Academicians and others whom we could name, have obtained places, honours, and pensions. His first attempts at poetry procured him, in 1806, the protection of Lucien Buonaparte-the Lorenzo de Medicis of the family: but he would accept nothing from him -and sang the praises of his protector only after he had fallen into disgrace with Napoleon. During the hundred days, he was offered the lucrative office of Censor, which he refused. Deprived of his place of 1200 francs a year, in the Council of Public Instruction, M. Laffitte offered him one under him, with a large salary; but he refused this also, preferring, like the wolf in the fable, to be poor and lean, and to keep his neck free from the mark of the collar. Before the loss of his place, he wrote, as he has said, to amuse himself-now he writes for bread-and he lives free, independent, loved, esteemed, admired by all France, except the Jesuits and the Ultras.

SOME ACCOUNT OF A LATE TRIAL FOR MURDERNOT CORDER'S *.

THE English are, undoubtedly, by no means distinguished for ferocity or thirst of blood; and yet it is quite horrible to think of the number of trials for murder which the assizes just concluded present; and many of them are marked with circumstances of atrocity, such as we had hoped this country could not, at this time, have produced. We do not now more immediately allude to the case of Corder—for, dreadful as that murder was, the public have been saturated, even to disgust, with the accounts of it before the trial, (to say nothing of what has taken place since,) in a manner which was equally a disgrace to the parties concerned, and an outrage upon public justice, We cannot do better than set before our readers Chief Baron Alexander's admirable remarks on this subject, at the commencement of his summing-up on Corder's trial:

"Before his Lordship proceeded to read the evidence, he felt it to be his duty to make some observations to the jury upon that part of the prisoner's defence, in which he had justly complained of the very improper means that had been adopted to excite an effect mischievous to the accused. He had complained of exparte statements which had been published in the newspapers, calculated to make an unfavourable impression against him before he took his trial. It was in the highest degree unjust and mischievous for any persons, for the sake of a temporary profit, to act in a way so likely to excite a strong prejudice against a man charged with an offence of so serious a nature; and he could not sufficiently reprobate such a practice. He had also heard that handbills had been circulated, and shows exhibited, which tended to create a prejudice against the accused; but what had most excited his indignation, was a circumstance, the truth of which he could scarcely credit, till it was proved in evidence, that a person professing to be a minister of the gospel, had erected a pulpit near the barn where it was stated the catastrophe in question took place, and had preached to an ignorant mob on the subject of the murder. His lordship said, he could not imagine anything more contrary to the spirit of the religion the preacher professed-he did not know who he was-than the plan adopted by him to create a prejudice against a man who was soon to take his trial for an offence affecting his life. He hoped there was some misrepresentation as to the conduct of this preacher; but all acts calculated to excite popular feeling against an accused person before his trial could not be too strongly condemned; and he was confident the jury would banish from their bosoms every impression that had been made therein, by anything which they had seen or heard before they came to the jury-box, whether in a newspaper, or by a sermon, or by shows, and that they would-as they were by a solemn duty bound confine themselves solely to the evidence which had been

We are under the necessity of using a somewhat quaint title, to prevent the possibility of any reader of our Magazine throwing it down in disgust, in the belief that we were about to add something more to the heap of revolting trash, which the newspapers have raked together about the ruffian of " the Red Barn" at Polstead.

SOME ACCOUNT OF A LATE

[Sept.

given on the trial, and give that due weight to the evidence for the prosecution, as well as that for the defence, that justice to the public as well as to the prisoner demanded."

A man of the Chief Baron's knowledge of the world and of human nature, must be aware that to do this entirely is beyond the power of the human mind-more especially on the minds of men of the limited degree of cultivation which usually belongs to those who serve on juries. Fortunately, in this case, the proof was ample: but that in no degree renders the crime-for it is one-less on the parts of the newspapers who, at the time of Corder's accusation, wrote of him as though he had been already convicted-or of the wretched mountebank who, in the character of a preacher, ministered to the curiosity, and low appetite for horrors, of the multitude.

But we have been chiefly led into these reflections, by a letter we have received from a friend of ours, a barrister on the Oxford circuit, concerning a trial at Shrewsbury for a murder, which we may well characterize, with him, when considered under all its circumstances, as "one of the-if not the very-most horrible that our criminal records present.' The case has since been reported in the papers — but our friend, who was present at the trial, gives us details and comments, which, of course, are out of the scope of a newspaper report. We give his letter verbatim:

"My dear

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"Shrewsbury, August 5, 1828.

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I know not whether the following will be of any use to you in the way of your magazine;—if it be, so much the better;-but, whether or no, I must write-for really I want vent for all the emotions of various kinds of horror, detestation, and disgust, with which has been filled for the last eight-and-forty hours. These have been occamind sioned by a trial and execution for a murder—which, when I look at it under all its bearings of the how and the wherefore of who were the accused and who the accuser-of what were the motives of each and all, I cannot but consider as one of the-if not the very-most horrible that our criminal records present.

"But I will begin at the beginning: I will first tell you the story, as it was proved, bit by bit, in the course of a trial which lasted all day-and I will then mention a few circumstances which struck me most in court. The real facts are these:—it seems that, in the neighbourhood of Market Drayton, on the borders here of Shropshire and Staffordshire, there exists a very dreadfully depraved set of people; and that a gang, to the amount, as is said, of from forty to sixty people, is confederated for general purposes of plunder. This, I take it, is a little exaggerated: but that it is true to a considerable degree I fully believe-namely, that the nucleus of this gang, consisting of several persons, was most closely knit by ties of relationship, of connection, and of neighbourhood, as well as of guilt; and that the general depravity of the district enabled them, as occasion required, to add to their numbers to almost any extent. One of these persons, by name Thomas Ellson, was, last year, taken up for stealing potatoes; and, whilst in gaol for that charge, an accusation of sheep-stealing was brought against him. The chief evidence upon which this latter charge, a capital one, depended was that of a man who had occasion

ally joined in the proceedings of the gang, named James Harrison. It became, therefore, the object of the friends of Ellson to get this man out of the way. First, they determined to poison him; and Ellson's father-in-law, John Cox, went to an apothecary's shop to buy arsenic for that purpose. The boy in the shop refused to sell it him, unless some one else were by, which, as there was no one else in the house, could not then be the case; and Cox, not liking probably such formal proceedings, returned no more.

"The next step was perhaps one of the most extraordinary in the whole of this extraordinary case. Ann Harris, Ellson's mother, who had married a second husband of the name of Harris, went to a woman living in Drayton, whom she knew, and asked her if her husband were not going to Newcastle. The woman answered that he was. 'I wish,' said Harris, that he would buy me an ounce of arsenic. What do you want it for?' I want it to poison that damned scoundrel, James Harrison.'-The woman upon this remonstrated— assured her it was a very wicked thing to poison James Harrison,— and, after some conversation, old Ann Harris went away, promising that she would not!

"The story of Cox going to the shop to buy arsenic I learned from private information; but this last occurrence was given in evidence on the trial by the woman herself. Now, can you conceive such a state of society to exist? This old hag goes to a respectable neighbour-at least, nothing at all appeared against the woman's character-and asks her coolly, and as a matter of course, to procure her the means of murdering a certain individual. The matter is then discussed very much in the same sort of way as if the life of a dog had been in question, which one party might wish to save; and mark you, when the man Harrison disappeared very shortly after, this woman never told any one, magistrate or others, of this remarkable conversation, but let the matter quietly rest, till eleven months afterwards, when the murder was discovered from other sources!

"Poison having failed, it was determined to have recourse to more direct means. Accordingly, Ann Harris and old Cox subscribed fifty shillings a-piece, to hire Cox's two sons, and a young fellow of the name of Pugh, to put Harrison to death! Harrison lodged in the house of Pugh's father, and, it has been said, occupied the same bed with Pugh himself. On the night of the murder, Pugh, to use his own expression, ticed Harrison out of the house, to go and steal some bacon. At a spot previously agreed upon, they met the two younger Coxes; and, proceeding to a remote place, Pugh seized Harrison by the throat, while John Cox the younger took hold of his legs, and, throwing him down, they thus strangled him. Meanwhile, Robert Cox was digging the grave!

"The wretched man thus disposed of, everything remained perfectly quiet and unsuspected. It was generally supposed that he had gone out of the way to avoid giving evidence on Ellson's trial. Still it seems to me very extraordinary that, after the latter had been acquitted, the non-return of Harrison excited no suspicion. It did not, however, and the murder was discovered only by the means of Ellson himself. As soon as this fellow came out of gaol, the Coxes, Pugh,

and his mother, at various times, sometimes when several of them were together, and sometimes separately, told him all that had taken place, vaunting to him how they had saved him. The very night of his release, old Cox, one of his sons, and Pugh, bragged to him that if it had not been for them, he would not be here and the next day when he was at his mother's, Robert Cox came thither, and said to her with oaths and abuse, If thee doesn't give me more money, I will fetch him and rear him up against thy door!'-alluding to the murdered man!

"Nothing, however, transpired, till, towards the end of June in this year, Ellson was taken up for stealing fowls; when in order to save himself from the punishment attending this offence, at the most seven years' transportation, but nearly always imprisonment, he told all that the guilty persons had told him; and on his evidence they were apprehended.

"I had heard a good deal of the circumstances, the day before; and, certainly, it was with a considerable degree of that strong and eager interest which deserves a better name than curiosity when thus excited by the contemplation of awful guilt, that I entered the court, on Saturday, to witness the trial. The five prisoners were already at the bar: old Ann Harris stood first;-she seemed what one would ordinarily call a smart, tight, old woman-her features were small and regularly formed, and her countenance was remarkable only for a pair of exceedingly keen and sparkling black eyes, the expression of which, however, was certainly in no degree indicative of ferocity. Old Cox stood next to her, and his countenance was very bad indeed-by far the worst of the five: his mouth, especially, had a most unpleasing, almost revolting, aspect. It was easy to believe the current story that he was at the head of the gang at Drayton-the very patriarch of all the thieves and scoundrels in that part of the country. He had, undoubtedly, brought his sons up to robbery as to a trade, and he had now hired them to commit murder! The two sons were next to him, and were not remarkable in their aspect in any way. Some persons near me attempted to trace all manner of evil passions in their facesbut I am convinced this was occasioned solely from their being in the dock accused of murder. Pugh was last-and he was an ill-looking fellow enough, though not, as I think, strikingly so. Some thought he had a gipsey look, but this seemed to me a total mistake. His complexion was very yellow, more strictly yellow indeed and less dark than that of the gipsies, but it had not that transparency which is nearly always more or less apparent in those of real gipsey blood; and, certainly, he had not the wild and peculiar eye of that singular race on the contrary, his was prominent and dull—not, like their's, deep-seated, keen, and ever in motion.

"The trial proceeded, and one of its terrible peculiarities became very soon apparent. This was that a vast proportion of the witnesses were of the closest kindred to the accused. And what, though perhaps not quite morally so horrid, was physically more so, was the fact of the father of the murdered man being called to speak to the identity of the body-a body which, having lain in the earth nearly a year, was so totally decomposed as to be recognizable only by the clothes: to this the father added that the colour of the hair was that of his son!'

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