in America, in the state of Maine, at Auburn in New York, and in New Jersey, where the results are highly unfavourable. In the gaol of Maine, eleven persons were in one year confined in soliude for short periods, none exceeding six months. Of these, two committed suicide in their cells; another, sentenced to sixty-two days, could scarcely endure fifty-six days, and this only by the help of four removals, for several days at a time, into the hospital, for the recovery of his health. When last removed from the cell, he shivered like an aspen leaf-his pulse was very feeble-his articulation could scarcely be heard at the distance of eight feet, and he could with difficulty stand alone. Another, who was sentenced for six months, endured little more than two months, when he was necessarily removed to the hospital, where he remained near three months, and was then pardoned on account of ill health. The experienced superintendent of this prison thought, that nearly as much time was necessary in the hospital, to fulfil long terms of solitary confinement, as in the cells; and the legislature of Maine abolished solitary confinement as a punishment, and enacted that all punishments by imprisonment should be by confinement to hard labour. At Auburn in New York, the experiment was equally unsuccessful, and the punishment was abandoned. In New Jersey, where the cells were so arranged, that the men could converse freely, though not see each other, and where the evil of corrupt society was therefore not avoided, the prisoners' health did not materially suffer.* But although confinement in absolute solitude, for any considerable period, can never, we are convinced, be used as an efficient punishment, yet we believe that the combination of a certain degree of solitude with hard labour, rigid discipline, moderate diet, and religious instruction, which is now adopted in the Penitentiary in London, and at various large prisons in America, (especially that of Sing Sing, described by Captain Hall in the first volume of his Travels,) forms a scheme of punishment from which much good may be expected, and which ought gradually to be extended. That the strict discipline of the Penitentiary is regarded with some terror by criminals, is clear, from the evidence of Mr. Wakefield, Mr. Wontner, and other witnesses in 1831;-but, unhappily, the building, enormous as it looks, contains but 650 convicts (costing 561. per annum each, instead of 387., which is the average expense in gaols) out of the many thousands whose punishment is to be pro * See Appendix to Report of Committee on Criminal Commitments and Convictions in 1829. vided vided for. These, it must be remembered, are picked individuals; and there is the greatest doubt whether the system could be advan tageously applied to the more heinous and depraved criminals. At all events, it must be the work of years, at an expense of millions, to establish any such system as a general substitute for the convict colonies and the county gaols. Who must not cordially wish success to all efforts directed to the end of rendering secondary punishments terrific and effectual? But as long as they possess their present character, we can hardly believe that any legislature, composed of practical and reflecting men, will consent to put in hazard the security of commerce and of private property by further reducing capital punishments, however strongly humanity may prompt to such a proceeding, and however warmly every man must desire to pave the way for it by the improvement of secondary penalties. We mean, in a future Number, to take up the subject of Penitentiaries in detail; meantime we beg leave to offer our readers an extract from a Letter to an Irish Judge, which was published, and, though anonymous, excited a good deal of attention, eighteen years ago; and which, on turning it up the other day among a world of long-forgotten things, struck us as having a most close and remarkable applicability to too many of the circumstances of the present time. Thus wrote, in 1815, a great living poet and philosopher; and we humbly recommend what he then wrote to the consideration of the ministers of the crown. Etiam in falso verar, the true lover of his country, even by his mistakes, presents a contrast with the insidious ingenuity of the demagogue, whose character it has been in all ages, and in all countries, to convey falsehood even when he utters truth. No wise and good man will wilfully draw the attention of the multitude to errors and calamities which he himself knows to be either not at all, or only gradually and slowly, remediable. A Christian and a lawyer, in reverential gratitude to the framers and enacters-to the guardians and enforcers of public law, your Lordship must abhor all attempts to exasperate or embitter the popular mind on any occasion; how much more when the attempt is made by a mischievous display of evils which both the executive and legislative powers have long and anxiously struggled to remove; with how much intenser feeling when their wisest plans and best intended efforts are known to have been mainly baffled by the very prejudices and antipathies which the too exclusive and too passionate attention to these evils first kindled, and still continues to feed and furnish. 'Let us not delude ourselves. The bulwarks and temples of ancient institutions, which had been undermined and thrown prostrate, are now indeed rebuilding. By the heroic persistance of Great Britain, and and the inherent elasticity of her commercial system; by the natural reaction of all human events, and the subsequent final explosion of imprisoned and compressed Europe, we have shattered or blasted the terrific engineer in the mine of his own digging. The visible organization of Jacobinism has been crushed or torn asunder;-but the life, the evil principle, cannot die, as long as the soil of a half-knowledge and a proud ignorance supplies its own specific juices to the envy, ambition, and revenge, which, alas! are the indigenous growth of poor human nature. Many and strangely various are the shapes which the spirit of Jacobinism can assume. Now it is philosophy contending for indifference to all positive institutions, under the pretexts of liberality and toleration, and yet with all the bigotry of self-conceit, and all the diligence of bigotry, through every channel of communication-and by all the implements of annoyance-by contempt, by ridicule, by opprobrious charge or implication, persecuting all, as persecutors, who will not believe their forefathers fools and tyrants! Now it appears as refined sensibility and philanthropy, declaiming piteously concerning the wrongs and wretchedness of the oppressed many, and, in play or novel,'-(alas! we have got further than plays and novels now!)- amending the faulty and partial schemes of Providence, by assigning every vice and folly to the rich and noble, and all the virtues, with every amiable quality, to the poor and ignorant-but, mark you, not to flatter them into greater contentment with their lot: no, but to teach them to pity themselves alone, and at once to despise, hate, and envy their superiors. Their very crimes, forsooth, are not their own, but the crimes of their hard and neglectful guardians; their very crimes are not crimes, but brave acts of natural vengeance on their plunderers and task-masters. These are its shapes and dresses when the spirit of Jacobinism travels incognito, and in which it prepares and announces its approaching public entry. Behold it in that, its next and boldest metamorphosis, like the Kehama of our laureat, one and the same, yet many, and multiform, and dividuous, assaulting with combined attack all the gates and portals of law and usage, in all the blazonry of open war! -as journalist ladling out his "hell-broth" of Adder's fork and blind-worm's sting, Gall of gnat and owlet's wing, from his midnight caldron of slander and blasphemy; as club president, committee man, commissary-denouncer, accuser, and moborator; as septembrizing and petitioning Poissarde with lips of obscenity and hands of murder, and as incurable orator in the mad-house of a tumultuary legislature, in which all the blindness, presumption, ignorance, dupery, fraud, cupidity, and malice of a wicked nation are fairly represented by universal suffrage! a modern Solon, crushing and creating, till vaporous theorems concrete into meteor constitutions, the executive of which is entrusted to Massacre, with Peculation as First Lord of the Treasury, and Rapacity as Collector of the Revenue. Yet, amid all these fierce and feverish vexations, through all these whirling whirling storm-clouds of confusion and darkness, the "tricksey spirit," still provident for its own perpetuation, by these very horrors and amazements bribes or compels even the good and wise to yield it welcome and at least a passive support-in its next and final transformation, that of MILITARY DESPOTISM. In this, the fermented state, like a volcanic mountain, forms at length its crater and outlet; and through this pours forth its countless armies of demoralized fanatics, as so many rivers of lava, to spread through the surrounding realms a community of wickedness, wretchedness, and desolation. Let it not be objected, my Lord, that from mere caprice I have applied the opprobrious name of Jacobinism to various and discordant forms of folly and might. They are all one, or at least of one family, all united or at least confraternized by the same marked and distinct characters. In all alike the cry is evermore of RIGHTS-never of DUTIES; in all alike the scheme consists in principles of abstract reason, which, belonging only to beings equable and unchanging, are ABOVE man, while the materials, implements, and agency of its realization, are found in terror, secrecy, falsehood, cupidity, and all the passions and tices which are, or ought to be, below man. In all alike the appeal is made to the malignant or selfish feelings, and whether it be the liberty that is promised, as in the earlier, or dominion, as in the later, stage of Jacobinism, it is alike effected, by destroying all those objects and reciprocities of human virtue, which alone had precluded or diminished slavery.'-Letter to Mr. Justice Fletcher, on his Charge to the Grand Jury of Wexford at the Summer Assizes of 1814. prac ART. VII.-Remarks on the Condition of Hunters, the Choice of Horses, and their Management; in a Series of Familiar Letters. By Nimrod. London. 8vo. 1831. OME of the remarks we have already offered with respect to SOME the naval and military authorship of these days, may be applied, mutatis mutandis, to the case of contemporary sportsmen. Treatises on the subjects of fishing, shooting, and, above all, foxhunting, now appear frequently, and obtain a measure of circulation which, in newspaper phrase, speaks volumes' for the increase of literary habits among classes of persons whose predecessors took, in general, no interest in ink-shed. There are even periodical works devoted entirely to the affairs of the sporting world, which handle topics, in former times taboo to all the muses, with such spirit and liveliness, that they find many readers among the profanum vulgus.' These productions, especially the 'New Sporting Magazine,' which is far the best of its class in every respect, are, we believe, reprinted in the United States; and we often observe translations of choice articles from them (descriptions of fox-chases, steeple-chases, and so forth) in the literary literary journals of the Continent, more especially of Germany, in the northern parts of which last country, particularly Hanover and Mecklenburg, many noblemen have of late been smitten with the ambition of rivalling their English friends in the management of the stud, and are already imitating them, with extraordinary success, in the style and fashion of the diversions of the turf and the chase. Under such circumstances, we hope the readers of our journal will not accuse us of any unpardonable trespass, if we now and then permit ourselves to be seduced into a little discussion on a class of subjects with which, hitherto, we have very rarely interfered. We must claim the right to concern ourselves, on occasion, with whatever interests any considerable portion of our countrymen; and can see no reason why, in pages, the greater part of which has of late years been given to topics connected with the social condition of the poorer orders, room should not be found from time to time for some notice of those healthful recreations which, by binding the British gentry to the habits of country life, are, in truth, of more service to our agricultural labourers than a whole statute-book of enactments, professedly drawn up with a view to their benefit, could supply the place of: And so, without further preface, let us for once sympathize with what even Milton calls an unreproved pleasure: 'Listening how the hounds and horn Through the high wood echoing shrill.' In various old writers-the Mayster of the Game, for instancewe find lively pictures of the ancient English chase, which in many respects, no doubt, was of a more noble and manly nature than that of the present day. The wolf, the bear, the boar, were among the favourite beasts of venery;' and none can doubt that the habit of pursuing such animals, independently of giving vigour to the frame, and strength to the constitution, must have nourished that martial ardour and fearless intrepidity, which, when exerted in the field of battle, generally won the day for our gallant ancestors. The hart, the stag, the hind, the roebuck, and the hare, are likewise constantly mentioned, as is also the wild or mertin-cat, There are sufficient documents to show that the wolf was hunted in England so lately as the fourteenth century; and, in the fifteenth, it was so common in Scotland, that the legislature, for the purpose of destroying the breed, enjoined every baron to hunt this animal four times within the year.-See the Black Acts, James I., 6, 115; James II., 6, 98. In the year 1281, a commission was granted by Edward I. to Peter Corbet, to hunt and destroy all the wolves he could discover in the counties of Gloucester, Worcester, Hereford, Salop, and Stafford.-Rymer's Fœdera, vol.ii. p. 168. now |