o'clock, the prisoner was brought into court." It is impossible not to pause in admiration at the precision of the chronicler of these extraordinary events. It was Monday, not Tuesday nor Wednesday, nor any other day in the week, but the very day which follows Sunday. It was a quarter past ten o'clock, "by a stop watch, my Lord." We are then favored with a minute description of the person of the prisoner and the substance of the indictment; which was for three crimes: 1st, poisoning his young friend, Hippolyte Ballet; 2d, with having destroyed the will of the deceased, in order to convert his property to his own use; and 3dly, poisoning the brother of the deceased, Auguste Ballet. The poison alleged to have been used in both cases, was of a vegetable kind, called acetate of morphine. Then follows a summary of the facts elicited from the prisoner by the examination of the president, the testimony of the brother-in-law of the deceased, three medical gentlemen, two druggists and six other witnesses; and all this is condensed, by some hydraulic process, into less than four pages. The prisoner was convicted and executed, protesting his innocence to the last moment.

We believe we have stated very fairly the substance of the information contained in this report. It establishes the fact, that in the year 1823, a person was tried and convicted, in this world of ours, at a place called Paris, on the charge of murder by poison. Such an event did really happen, and the name of the murderer was Castaing. Of his previous history, of his birth, parentage and education, not a syllable is said. What strong temptation had first led him astray, what were the successive steps he took, if any, in the career of profligacy and crime, these and other questions, that suggest themselves to every mind, are not even alluded to; and we are utterly at a loss to conceive, therefore, what valuable purpose either the reading or writing such a thing could subserve.

The French report opens with some just reflections upon the anomaly, that a well educated man of respectable birth should suddenly plunge into crime: but we are warned that vice is progressive and gradual, and that such cases very rarely occur. A fine sketch of the earlier years of Castaing is given, and his character, the most prominent trait of which was obstinacy, as it displayed itself in youth, is portrayed. He commenced the study of medicine and devoted himself to it with considerable assiduity. It was while engaged in the ardent pursuit of his future profession, that he made the acquaintance of a widow, and formed a liaison with her, which was followed by an immediate neglect of his studies; and afterwards by his becoming the father of two children, and thus liable for the maintenance of three persons. This fatal circumstance of the criminal connexion of this young man, of limited fortune, with an abandoned female, which was his first step in vice, and drove him on to the commission of other offences, is not noticed in the Philadelphia book; and the great lesson is lost, which this and so many other criminal trials teach and illustrate, with such solemn emphasis and infinite variety, that it is the first dereliction from virtue that destroys; it is the passage from good to ill; the leap over that apparently narrow chasm, which may to all appearance be easily repassed, but which widens into a mighty gulf, which few boats have been known to recross. We have been much struck by the fact, in reading these volumes, that the vice in which Castaing indulged himself was the first deviation from rectitude in the history of so many noted criminals. It was the initiatory step in that career of crime, which they afterwards trod with such remorseless depravity. Before the seductive influence of this depraved appetite, the good principles of Castaing bent and gave way. The strong claims of friendship were unheeded. It became his master, and he its slave, and what he would do, was known to no man,

least of all to himself. How much of truth, and how strikingly is that truth expressed,—is there, in the advice of Burns, in regard to this indulgence.

"I waive the quantum of the sin,

The hazard of concealing,

But, och it hardens a' within,
And petrifies the feeling."

If criminal trials do not teach some lesson of virtue, or illustrate some truth, beyond the mere record of guilt, they are worse than useless; they can serve only to stimulate or gratify a depraved taste.

The report then goes on to state all the circumstances attending the death of the two young friends of Castaing; the result of the post-mortem examination; and to discuss the nature and effect of vegetable poisons, and to give the testimony of the various witnesses-eminent physicians and chemists-with that fullness, which is necessary to gratify a reasonable curiosity, and to give the report a permanent value. This is followed by the speeches of the advocates, which are of a high order of talent, but are wholly omitted in the Philadelphia book. The whole report covers one hundred pages, and concludes with an affecting account of the closing scene of the prisoner's life.

We hope that this brief and imperfect account of the differences between the two reports, will be sufficient to show the radical defects of our system. An American report is a mechanical, the French is an intellectual performance. The preparation of the one requires judgment, taste, talents, learning; of the other, nothing but the knowledge of stenography. The one unites in himself the various qualities of historian, biographer, critic, philosopher, a teacher of morals; the other performs the drudgery of the copyist. The American employs his ears and his fingers, nothing more; the other brings into action all his intellectual and moral

faculties, and the result is that the one produces a tedious and formal record; the other a bright and living picture. An American reporter copies the indictment, writes out the questions and answers; sometimes gives the speeches of counsel, and the charge of the judge, and the verdict of the jury, and his work is done. He follows the advice of Hamlet to the players, "write no more than is set down for you" to write, and he no more dares to travel beyond this prescribed formula, than does the clerk who makes up the record of the judgment. The Frenchman, on the contrary, enters into the spirit of the occasion; he seizes the pencil of the painter; he gives utterance to his own emotions, and, in short, makes his report the drama, that every criminal trial really is. There is to us the same difference between the two systems, as there is between the glowing pages of Gibbon and the formal and repulsive documents from which he gathered his facts. The case of governor Wall, which makes a chapter in the inimitable letters of Espriella (well known to be from the pen of Robert Southey) shows what a charm true genius can impart to anything it touches. That is a perfect model of reporting, and quite equal to anything to be found in the French.

In bringing our remarks upon this subject to a close, we beg leave to call the attention of the profession, for a moment, to the ample materials we possess, for one or more volumes of political "Causes Célèbres." There is the case of Aaron Burr and his associates; of judge Chace, before the senate of the United States; of judge Peck, before the same high tribunal; of judge Prescott, before the senate of Massachusetts; of general Hull; of Smith and Ogden, &c. In the line of remarkable criminal cases, there is that of major Goodrich, in which Mr. Webster won his earliest laurels; of Avery; the Crowninshields; the insurance case in New York, in which old printing types were shipped from the West Indies, in boxes, for specie, a case which was civil

only in form; and a hundred others, which our professional brethren will readily call to mind.

These suggestions are respectfully commended to the serious attention of a learned, patriotic, and liberal profession. The materials are before them; the talent is in them; the field is ripe for the harvest; no man has yet thrust in his sickle; shall the harvest be reaped?

H. G. O. C.

ART. IX.-LIFE OF SIR SAMUEL ROMILLY.

[We have compiled, chiefly by abridging, the following life of Romilly, from a review in the London Quarterly Review, for September, 1840, of the Memoirs of Sir Samuel Romilly, written by himself, with a selection of his correspondence, edited by his sons. The reviewer thus describes the work:

"The publication is made up of the following materials:-1st, a narrative by himself of his birth, parentage, education, and life to 1789, which occupies not above a fourth of the first volume; 2ndly, a series of letters to friends, mostly foreigners, about equivalent to one volume; 3dly, the diary of his parliamentary life. The Narrative, particularly the earlier portion of it, is written with candor and simplicity, and is, we think, much the most interesting portion of the publication-the Letters, which relate for the most part to public and political events of the times from 1780 to 1803, are by no means lively, but in a remarkably good, clear, unaffected style, and showing very considerable information and sagacity. The Diary extends from March 1806, when he became solicitor-general, to a short time before his death in the autumn of 1818; it consists of memoranda of his political and parliamentary life, written from day to day, and of course imbued with all the partialities and passions of the moment, which no active politician can put off, and with a peculiarity of prejudice which seems to have been progressive in his honest but enthusiastic, and even in his youth, some what saturine disposition."]

SIR SAMUEL ROMILLY'S grandfather was one of the most respectable class of persons, as we think, recorded in history -the French refugees-who, on the revocation of the edict of Nantes, abandoned, for conscience' sake, fortune, kindred and country, and prospered (as they generally did) in the land of their adoption, with no other resources than an