BURKE AND HARE. 185 North. Perhaps I may, for next Number. Meanwhile, shall we clear decks? Shepherd. Did you ever see sic a preparation o' a skeleton o' a turkey? We maun send it to the College Museum, to staun in a glass-case aside Burke's. North. What did you think, James, of the proceedings of these two Irish gentlemen ?1 Shepherd. That they were too monotonous to impress the imagination. First ae drunk auld wife, and then anither drunk auld wife-and then a third drunk auld wife-and then a drunk auld or sick man or twa. The confession got unco monotonous-the Lights and Shadows o' Scottish Death want relief though, to be sure, poor Peggy Paterson, that Unfortunate, broke in a little on the uniformity; and sae did Daft Jamie; for whilk last murder, without ony impiety, ane may venture to say, the Devil is at this moment ruggin that Burke out o' hell-fire wi' a three-pronged fork, and then in wi' him again, through the ribs-and then stirring up the coals wi' that eternal poker—and then wi' the great bellows blawin up the furnace, till, like an Etna, or Mount Vesuvius, it vomits the murderer out again far ower into the very middle o' the floor o' the infernal regions. Tickler. Whisht-whisht-James! Shepherd. Nae system o' divinity shuts mortal mouths against such enormous monsters. I am but a worm. We are all worms. But we crawl in the licht o' heaven; and God has given us voices to be lifted up from the dust, when horrid guilt loosens our tongues; and the moral sense, roused by religion, then denounces, without misgivings, the curse o' heaven on the hell-doomed soul o' the Atheistic murderer. What forbids? North. Base blind superstition, in the crimes of the creature forgetful of the laws of the Creator. Nothing else. Shepherd. Was he penitent? If sae, I abhor my words. North. Impenitent as a snake-remorseless as a tiger. I 1 Burke and his paramour Mrs Macdougal, and Hare and his wife, were tried in Edinburgh in 1829, for an extensive series of murders, perpetrated for the purpose of supplying an anatomical school with subjects; which they did without challenge, and at a sufficiently remunerating price. Burke was executed: the others escaped,-Hare having kept his neck out of the noose by turning king's evidence. The sentiments expressed in the text are not one whit overcharged. 186 NORTH'S DESCRIPTION OF BURKE. studied, in his cell,' his hard, cruel eyes, from whose lids had never dropped the tear "That sacred pity had engender'd,"— his hardened lips, which ruth never touched nor moved from their cunning compression-his voice rather soft and calm, but steeped in hypocrisy and deceit—his collected and guarded demeanour, full of danger and guile-all, all betrayed, as he lay in his shackles, the cool, calculating, callous, and unrelenting villain. As the day of execution drew near, his anxiety was often-I am told by those who saw him, and marked him well-manifest in his dim or darkened countenance-for the felon's throat felt in imagination the suffocating halter; but when that dream passed off, he would smile-nay laugh-and inly exult in his series of murders, so long successfully perpetrated-and the bodies of the slaughtered still carried to a ready market-prompt payment without discount-eight or ten pounds for a corpse, and whisky cheap!-so that murderers, and those about to be murdered, might all get speedily fuddled, and drunk together-and then the hand on the mouth and throat-a few gasps and convulsions-and then corpse after corpse huddled in among straw, or beneath chaff-beds, or into herring-barrels then into tea-chests—and off to the most unsuspicious and generous of surgeons that ever gave a bounty on the dead for the benefit of the living. Shepherd. Was he a strong fallow, Burke? North. No, a neat little man of about five feet five, well proportioned, especially in his legs and thighs-round-bodied, but narrow-chested-arms rather thin-small wrists, and a moderate-sized hand-no mass of muscle anywhere about his limbs or frame-but vigorously necked-with hard forehead and cheek-bones-a very active, but not a powerful man-and intended by nature for a dancing-master. Indeed he danced well-excelling in the Irish jig-and when working about Peebles and Inverleithen he was very fond of that recreation. In that neighbourhood he was reckoned a good specimen of the Irish character-not quarrelsome-expert with the spade -and a pleasant enough companion over a jug of toddy. 1 I accompanied Professor Wilson on the occasion when he visited the murderers and murderesses in their cells, and I can testify to the perfect fidelity of his description. HIS DESCRIPTION OF HARE. 187 Nothing repulsive about him, to ordinary observers at leastand certainly not deficient in intelligence. But he "had that within which passeth show "—"there was a laughing devil in his eye," James-and in his cell he applied in my hearing over and over again the words "humane man," to those who had visited him, laying the emphasis on humane, with a hypocritical tone, as I thought, that showed he had not attached its appropriate meaning to the word, but used it by rote like a parrot Shepherd. Safe us! what like was Hare? North. The most brutal man ever subjected to my sightand at first look seemingly an idiot. His dull, dead, blackish eyes, wide apart, one rather higher up than the other, his large, thick, or rather coarse-lipped mouth-his high, broad cheek-bones, and sunken cheeks, each of which when he laughed—which he did often-collapsed into a perpendicular hollow, shooting up ghastlily from chin to cheek-bone-all steeped in a sullenness and squalor not born of the jail, but native to the almost deformed face of the leering miscreantinspired not fear, for the aspect was scarcely ferocious, but disgust and abhorrence-so utterly loathsome was the whole look of the reptile! He did not look so much like a murderer as a resurrectionist-a brute that would grope in the grave for the dead rather than stifle the living-though, to be sure, that required about an equal degree of the same kind of courage as stifling old drunk women, and bedridden old men, and helpless idiots-for Daft Jamie was a weak creature in body, and though he might in sore affright have tumbled himself and his murderer off the bed upon the floor, was incapable of making any effort deserving the name of resistance. Shepherd. Was he no sorry and ashamed, at least, for what he had dune? North. No more than if he had killed so many rabbits. He was ready to laugh, and leer, and claw his elbow, at every question put to him which he did not comprehend, or in which he thought he heard something funny. His sleep, he said, was always sound, and that he "never dreamed none; " he was much tickled by the question, "Did he believe in ghosts?" or "Did he ever see any in the dark?" and gobbled out, grinning all the while a brutal laugh, an uncouth expression of contempt for such foolery—and then muttering "thank God" 188 NORTH'S DESCRIPTION OF THEIR WIVES. -words he used more than once-callously, and sullenly, and vacantly as to their meaning, he thought-"that he had done nought to be afeared for;" his dialect being to our ears a sort of slovenly mixture of the "lower than the lowest " Irish, and the most brutelike of the most sunken 66 Coomberland." Shepherd. Hark ye, sir,-ane likes to hear about monstersWas Hare a strang Deevil Incarnate? North. Not very. Sluggish and inert-but a heavier and more muscular man above than Burke. He prided himself, however, on his strength, and vaunted that he could lift five sixty-fives, by his teeth, fastened to a rope, and placed between his knees. But it was easy to see he lied, and that the anecdote was but a trait of vanity;—the look he had in all things of an abject, though perhaps quarrelsome coward-and his brows and head had scars of wounds from stone or shillela, such as are to be seen on the head and brows of many a brutal craven. Shepherd. Did ye see their leddies? North. Poor, miserable, bony, skinny, scranky, wizened jades both, without the most distant approach to good-lookingness, either in any part of their form, or any feature of their face peevish, sulky, savage, and cruel, and evidently familiar, from earliest life, with all the woe and wretchedness of guilt and pollution-most mean in look, manner, mind, dress-the very dregs of the dregs of prostitution. Hare has most of the she-devil. She looked at you brazen-facedly, and spoke with an affectedly plaintive voice, "gentle and low, an excellent thing in woman," and held her yellow, "yammering" infant (the image of its father) in her arm-in prison we saw her-as if it were a bundle of ragsbut now and then looking at it with that species of maternal fondness with which impostors sit on house-steps, staring at their babies, as if their whole souls yearned towards themwhile no sooner have you passed by, than the angry beggar dashes its head, to make it cry better, against the pavement. Tickler. Prodigious nonsense, James, was written in the newspapers about the "dens" of the monsters. Burke's room was one of the neatest and snuggest little places I ever 1 Although Hare had no moral, yet he had physical sensibilities. I remember he complained sorely of "the cold"-the season being winter, and the windows of his cell unglazed. THE MURDERERS' DENS. 189 saw-walls well plastered and washed-a good wood-floorrespectable fireplace-and light well-paned window, without a single spider's web. You reached the room by going along a comfortable, and by no means dark passage, about fifteen feet long-on each side of which was a room, inhabited, the one by Mrs Law, and the other by Mr and Mrs Connoway. Another short passage (with outer and inner door of course) turned off into the dwelling of Mr Burke-the only possible way of making it a room by itself-and the character of the whole flat was that of comfort and cheerfulness to a degree seldom seen in the dwellings of the poor. Burke's room, therefore, so far from being remote or solitary, or adapted to murder, was in the very heart of life, and no more like a den than any other room in Edinburgh-say that in which we, who murder nobody, are now sitting at supper. Neither was any other murder than that of "t'ould woman "there perpetrated. Yet Sir Walter Scott, it was said, declared that, with all his wonderful imagination, he could picture to himself nothing so hideous. Sir Walter is not given to compliment his own imagination so—and if ever he saw the room, must have approved of it as a room of a very comfortable but commonplace and unpretending character. Shepherd. But isna Hare's house a dreadfu' place? I howp it is, sir? North. It is at the bottom of a close-and I presume that one house must always be at the bottom of a close-but the flat above Hare's dwelling was inhabited,—and two of his apartments are large and roomy-well fitted for a range of chaff-beds, but not particularly so for murder. A small place, eight feet or ten by four or five, seems to have been formed by the staircase of another dwelling and the outer wall, and no doubt, were murder committed there, it would seem a murderous place. But we have slept in such a place fifty times, without having been murdered-and a den, consisting of two large rooms, with excellent fireplaces and windows, and one small one, is not, to our apprehension, like the den of a fox or a wolf-nor yet of a lion or a tiger. The house outside looks like a minister's manse.— -But I am getting tedious and wearisome, James ! Shepherd. No you. But let us change the subject a wee I howp, sirs, you baith went to the hanging? |