Alexander Leighton

“ Throughout the High Street and Canongate, and down through the squalid wynds and closes, where, though crime and misery shake hands over the bottle of whisky, the death-bed still retains some claims over the affections, and where religion is sometimes able to extort from the demons of passion the unwilling tribute of compunction, these strange men prowled in the hope of finding or making a monster. ”

“ Over all, there was the oppressive awe inspired by the presence of the fearful men and women, as if they had been demons of monstrous forms and powers placed there under restraining bonds. At several times,—and especially when Hare described the screigh of the little old woman which preceded that ten minutes’ agony in which she lay under the pressure of Burke—Hare being all the while, according to his lie, sitting coolly looking on,—you might have heard deep sighs escaping from strong hearts, in spite of resolutions to restrain them. ”

“ They had only to look a few yards to the west, up Portsburgh, or to the east, up the Grassmarket and Cowgate, to be certain that “a ten pounds,” all prepared, was walking or staggering as if every roll to a side offered to be one into their arms. They had thus reason, if they had been of a philosophical habit,—and one had the poetry of sentiment—to thank the great genius Society for his injustice to his own members. And what an extraordinary injustice it appears, when we consider that the high head of Wealth is upheld by the tax of respect imposed upon the poor and the humble! ”

“ Turn the question in any way you please, your final cause is nowhere, unless it be that the experience of agonised death-beds is the opportunity of virtue—a poor back-handed way of making people better, and certainly bought at a terrible expense. But even taking the advantage in this limited form, it does not exhaust the conditions of the question; for while the dying sinner is altogether unconscious that his agonies will go forth to the world and be an example, his mind is in another direction. He looks forward, and the more keenly, that he cannot look backwards. ”

“ A salutary horror, not only of their great crimes, but also of those lesser ones which led to these, pervaded the people of Scotland long after the tragedy of so many acts and scenes was performed; and thus it is, in the providence of God, that virtue becomes brighter by the contrast with vice. It is only, as some one has observed, when the tempest tosses the waves of the ocean into mountains that we see into its depths. It was by the light of burning Troy that Æneas saw the faces of the gods; and so it is through the light of human passions that we discover the nature of the heart of man. ”

“ We smile at the extravagance, while we acknowledge some kind of truth, which we cannot understand. These small traces of the little world of crime within the back room “with the window looking out on the dead wall,” long since destroyed and erased from the bigger world of which it formed a part and the shame, may be brought together and filled up by the imagination, with a certainty so far removed from the feeling of fiction, that we might scarcely regret the want of particulars. ”

“ We can fancy the godly man, we believe all unconscious of the intentions of his brother, pouring the holy unction of his prayers over the struggling spirit of the dying Christian, and the doctor counting the pulses as they died away into that stillness which was to be the prelude to the payment—five pounds—for the deserted temple. One recording angel would fly to heaven with a name to be inscribed in the roll of eternal salvation, and the other to Edinburgh to announce that another body was to be inserted in the black list of Surgeon’s Square. ”

“ The moment Hare arrived, and there being now no one in the house except themselves, and the unconscious Mary still lying in bed, they fell straight upon their victim. The old story again. The process was familiar to them—the energy at ready call—the execution easy. Burke springs upon the senseless victim—Hare is at his post—the heavy body pressing with the knees upon the soft bosom—the closing up of the mouth and nose—the gurgling—the long inspirations—the watchings to listen, and listen again, and examine if all was finished—the make-sure—the finish. ”

“ Lodgers began to be less cared for, as mere lodgers, though the most squalid of them had recommendations of another kind, of which they themselves were not aware; and as for the men, the producers of this wonderful change, they were now gentlemen at large—the huckster’s cart, the hurley, the old horse, the stool, and the awl-box, having been discharged and despised as unworthy of those who held in their hands a charm invested with even greater power than the ring of Giges or Mongogul, even that of turning, by a touch, the mortal part of human nature into gold. ”

“ Little more was ever heard of Hare. If the Almighty, as Mr M‘Diarmid added, when He appeared specially in the affairs of the world, left Cain to wander hopeless on the face of the earth, why should not Hare have been subjected to the same species of punishment? and, without wishing to refine too far, we may say, as the Roman said long ago, “Everything must bow to the majesty of the law; and that, from the weightiest circumstance down to the smallest, there is a medium course—a middle path—beyond which no rectitude and no safety to mortals can exist.” ”

“ Though the wily fox contrived to get his neighbours to cut off their tails to make them like himself in his misfortune of being excaudated, is that any reason why nature should repeal her law and produce therefore tailless foxes? We hope not. And so also, because science run mad decreed that she should be served by such men and such acts, in opposition to the first and last throbbings of the love of kindred, is that any reason why nature should renounce her right of forming man in the image of God, and with affections which are to endure through all eternity? ”

“ If we were fanciful, we might here go with the gentle poets, who tell us, in their way, that, like the dew-drop which falls in the evening, and shines equally clear on the deadly nightshade and the rose, it solaces virtue in adversity, without scorning sin in the pains of retribution. If, in our analysis of man’s character, we find not his heart, as the fire-opal, enclosing one of nature’s tears, we may throw the crucible aside, extinguish the fire, and cast the caput mortuum to the dogs ”

“ Enough if we know and experience that the wages of sin is death; but we have here even more to consider. While we can have no doubt that the tragedy of Burke and Hare is calculated to deter not only from that sin which it involves, but from all those lesser ones which follow from the temptations of mammon, we have to recollect that it put an end to a pre-existing evil of gigantic magnitude, and which all the adjurations of a distressed people were not able otherwise to effect. That evil, as we have seen, was body-snatching. ”

“ But what can be done with a man who has no symptoms of a human soul but that which shews itself when the eye counts with something like pleasure the price of a human body? Yet, strange enough, and perhaps unjustly enough, the two others were not more prized by their patrons than this degraded son of science, who served their purpose equally well—a fact which would have brought down the learned dignity of his co-labourers if they had had sense enough to notice it. ”

“ Then it was admitted, even by the “howlers,” that never, up to this time, had there been offered a body which could be said to have borne marks of violence; and if the minds of at least these generous and well-bred youths never entertained a suspicion of murder, the fact might more properly have been adduced as honourable to their estimate of mankind, than as an objection to their want of guard against an evil which had not yet appeared in the world, and which was to become, unhappily, in good old Scotland, a new species of crime. ”

“ Strange that in our country, where the passion is pretty strong, we have no such name, avarice being entirely different; but this passion may have been a rider on the love of drink, and then we cannot estimate either the one or the other, till we know the force of the countervailing restraints. If these—and there are many—are weak or nil, the passion may be a very weak affair, so that such beings as our principal actors might—seeing they wanted pity and religion and fear—have thought less of suffocating a fellow-creature than Bellarmine did of removing a fly from his face. ”

“ We cannot understand that she has so much to do that she is for ever in a hurry, so that we only see at times the skirt of her cloak. Then we are ourselves so restless and impatient for knowledge, that we snuff the candle of our inquiry so often that we can see nothing. Perhaps all this is intended for the purpose of giving us a wider world of imagination, and more ardour in peopling it with all its strange beings, spectral images, protean forms, wild movements—for what further end we know not, but we work our privilege in these days of fiction very well. ”

“ Knox was destined, as well by his powers as a public lecturer as by his ambition and vindictive impatience of an intruder on his peculiar walk, and independently altogether of the dark suspicions which rose like thick exhalations out of the depths of the great tragedy subsequently enacted, to become a marked man, and the centre of attraction to ardent students. His ambition felt, too, the quickening spur of Liston, who, as an extra-academical lecturer on surgery, offered for even more than a national reputation. ”

“ Yet the man still preserved more of a respectable character than those with whom he here associated—retaining even yet much of his disposition to serve, his quiet humour, if not a species of politeness, all of which was perfectly reconcilable with the presence of that potentiality of crime which lay slumbering in the heart, under the thin veil of religion, and not to be crossed or checked, when roused to action, by pity, no trace of which appeared to be in him. ”

“ There seemed to be a tacit admission that each knew that the other was in love with the same individual, and that each supposed the other the favourite, and that each hated the other with all the virulence of an unsuccessful competitor. In this strange state of things between two who had once been loving friends, Ferguson died of a disease the nature of which baffled the acuteness of the best surgeons, and in the course of a few days Duncan’s rival was consigned to a grave in the Buccleuch burying-ground. ”

“ Even vice has its traits of ludicrousness. Those of the neighbours who were fond of sights were often enough gratified by some wag going and reporting to the landlady that Willie Hare, as he was usually called, was upon the street drunk, whereupon the wife, herself probably in the same state, would issue forth in search of him, when a battle was the issue of the rencontre. Such was the kind of life led by this couple up to the time of Burke’s entry.
The passion of violence produced by inebriation will not always, or indeed often, afford any clue to character. ”