how much he was resolved upon it, has no other effect than to make him regard his escape as the greater and more miraculous: for still he fancies that he has escaped, and he looks back upon the danger to which his peace of mind was exposed, with that terror, with which one who is in safety may sometimes remember the hazard he was in of falling over a precipice, and shudder with terror at the thought." For, by one stroke and

-in one moment, we may plunge our years

In fatal penitence, and in the blight

Of our own soul turn all our blood to tears,

And colour things to come with hues of Night.

Shakspeare had thought deeply, and has touched repeatedly, on this general subject. The distinction broadly drawn by human judgments between a guilty design and a guilty deed, he illustrates in Bolingbroke's answer to Aumale, when the latter rushes in, and implores pardon beforehand for a yet unavowed crime:

Bol. Intended, or committed, was this fault ?
If but the first, how heinous e'er it be,

To win thy after-love I pardon thee.

To which a parallel passage might be quoted in Isabella's plea for the life of Angelo:

Let him not die: My brother had but justice,

In that he did the thing for which he died:

For Angelo,

His act did not o'ertake his bad intent;

And must be buried but as an intent

That perish'd by the way: thoughts are no subjects;
Intents but merely thoughts.

Suffolk less charitably pleads, a special pleader, against the spirit of leniency such as this, where he supposes the case of one

Who being accused a crafty murderer,

His guilt should be but idly posted over,

Because his purpose is not executed.

It is too truly objected by English critics, that a French dramatist's notion of virtue would seem to resolve itself into the conception, in the first instance, of some base design against the honour of a friend, or the chastity of a woman, and a valiant conquest of the meditated villainy at the last moment. His hero must sin greatly in thought, before he can prevail upon himself to exhibit a little virtuous instinct in act. His example is that of loose and vagrant passions checked on the eve of consummation. by an impulse. In England, we place the morality of the stage on a different basis. We do not dramatise mental violations of the Decalogue, and take credit to ourselves for the non-commission of crimes which we hold it to be demoralising even to contemplate." We do not sit in the playhouse "merely for the satisfaction of seeing an imperfect criminal retreat from his purpose in the end."

When with a sudden revulsion his heart recoils from its purpose, As from the verge of a crag, where one step more is destruction. Let us hope that the French conception of virtue, as thus delineated, may not take root downward and bear fruit upward, on English soil; and that few censors of our press may have to say of native

fiction what a discerning judge said of a novel happily forgotten, that the author's definition of innocence, so far as it could be made out, is, to be ready and willing to do wicked things, but not yet to have done them.

True, most true, that between the crime designed, and the crime committed, there is a great gulf fixed -by the communis sensus of practical ethics. When Enone reasons with Phèdre,

Quel crime a pu produire un trouble si pressant?

Vos mains n'ont point trempé dans le sang innocent?

the wo-begone queen replies,

Grâces au ciel, mes mains ne sont point criminelles.

But for all that, in her case, it is due alike to rhyme and reason to add,

Plût aux dieux que mon cœur fût innocent comme elles! Yet is it something, it is much, that besides her selfreproachful Plût aux dieux ! she can vent, as regards criminal action, an earnest Grâces au ciel! She has not crossed the gulf, which, deep as it may be, it takes but one step to cross. She has not come to the pass of the accomplished criminal, who, in virtue or by vice of his accomplished fact, must fall into the strain of guilty Hesperus, and say,

Wickedness,

How easy is thy lesson! Now I stand

Up to the throat in blood; from Mercy's records

For evermore my guilty name is razed.

But yesterday, oh blessed yesterday,

I was a man;

And now-I start amazed at myself.

VOL. II.

10

It is a remark of Mr. Disraeli's, that the pursuit of gaming, oftener than any other, leads men to selfknowledge. Appalled, he argues, by the absolute destruction on the verge of which the gamester finds his early youth just stepping; aghast at the shadowy crimes which, under the influence of this life, seem, as it were, to rise upon his soul, often he hurries to emancipate himself from this fatal thraldom, and with a ruined fortune and marred prospects, yet thanks his Creator that his soul is still white, and his conscience clear from those dark stains which Phèdre deprecated, from that one " damned spot" of which all the perfumes of Arabia could not cleanse Lady Macbeth's little hand.

It is Horace's teaching, in one of his seriously reflective moods, that not Heaven itself can annihilate or undo a deed done-non tamen irritum Quodcunque retro est, efficiet;

-neque

Diffinget, infectumque reddet

Quod fugiens semel hora vexit.

Oh the fierce sense

Of hopelessness! The fault is done! No keen

Remorse, no holy law of penitence,

Not God himself can make it not have been ;

Tho' Angels whisper peace, that thought comes in between.

Premeditation, writes Mr. Carlyle, is not performance, is not surety of performance; it is perhaps, at most, surety of letting whosoever wills perform. From the purpose of crime, he adds, to the act of crime,

there is an abyss: wonderful to think of. "The finger lies on the pistol; but the man is not yet a murderer; nay, his whole nature staggering at such a consummation, is there not a confused pause rather

-one last instant of possibility for him? Not yet a murderer; it is at the mercy of light trifles* whether the most fixed idea may not yet become unfixed. One slight twitch of a muscle, the deathflash bursts; and he is it, and will for Eternity be it; and Earth has become a penal Tartarus for him; his horizon girdled now not with golden hope, but with red flames of remorse; voices from the depth of Nature sounding, Wo, wo on him!"

We may apply in this stern, solemn sense, what Oswald says in Wordsworth's tragedy:

Action is transitory-a step, a blow,

The motion of a muscle-this way or that—
'Tis done, and in the after-vacancy
We wonder at ourselves like men betray'd:
Suffering is permanent, obscure and dark,
And shares the nature of infinity.

But this same Oswald is a daring sophist; and in his sneering disdain of compunctious visitings on the part of the man he is tempting to crime, he thus touches on the contingencies of criminal action—

* So Longfellow, in the context of a passage already cited: 46 Strange is the life of man, and fatal or fated are moments, Whereupon turn, as on hinges, the gates of the wall adaman

tine."

Miles Standish, § v.