THE SHEPHERD. The Bailie's Guse !-wha's he that? Is't ane o' the periodicals you're misca'ing? TICKLER. Yes-Waugh's Old New Edinburgh Review. It was called so, for the first time, by the Shepherd himself-and most aptly-as it waddled, flapped, and gabbled, out of the worthy Bailie's shop, through among the stand of coaches in Hunter-Square. NORTH. It was indeed a bright idea to fight a gander against a game-cock-Pool ver sus Jeffrey ! THE SHEPHERD. Weel, do you ken, I thought it a gay gude review-but it was unco late in noticing warks. The contributors, I jalouse, werena very original-minded lads, and lay back till they heard the general sugh. But when they did pronounce, I thought them, for the maist part, gude grammarians. TICKLER. The ninny I allude to, who must be a phrenologist, could utter not a syllable but "Hemans, Hemans, Hemans!" The lady must have been disgusted. THE SHEPHERD. No she indeed. What leddy was ever disgusted, even by the flattery of a fule? TICKLER. They were a base as well as a stupid pack. Low mean animosities peeped out in every page, and with the exception of our most excellent friend R., and two or three others, the contributors were scarcely fit to compile an obituary. The editor himself is a weak well-meaning creature, and when the Bailie's Guse breathed her last, he naturally became Tagger to the Phrenological Journal. NORTH. I should be extremely sorry to think that my friend Waugh, who is a wellinformed gentlemanly man, has lost money in this ill-judged business? The Guse, as you call it, occasionally quacked, as if half afraid, half angry, at poor innocent Maga, but I never gave the animal a single kick. Was its keep expensive to the Bailie? TICKLER. Too much so, I fear. These tenth-raters are greedy dogs. Do you not remember Tims? NORTH. Alas! poor Tims! I had forgot his importunities. But I thought I saw his Silliness in Taylor and Hessey, a month or two ago—" a pen-and-ink sketch of the late trial at Hertford." TICKLER. Yes-yes-yes-Tims on Thurtell!! By the way, what a most ludicrous thing it would have been, had Thurtell assassinated Tims! Think of Tims' face when he found Jack was serious. What sinall, mean, paltry, contemptible Cockney shrieks would he have emitted! 'Pon my honour, had Jack bonâ fide Thurtellized Tims, it would have been productive of the worst consequence to the human race; it would have thrown such an air of absurdity over murder. THE SHEPHERD. What! has that bit Cockney cretur, Tims, that I frighted sae in the Tent at Bræmar, when he offered to sing "Scots wha hae wi. Wallace bled," been writing about ae man murdering anither? He wasna blate. TICKLER. Yes, he has and his account is a curiosity. Tims thinks, that the most appalling circumstance attending the said murder, was, that everything was “in clusters."-" It is strange," quoth he, "that, solitary as the place was, and desperate as was the murder-the actors-the witnesses-all but the poor helpless solitary thing that perished, "were in clusters!" Hout, tout, Tims! VOL. XV. THE SHEPHERD. 3 C TICKLER. "The murderers were in clusters," he continues-" the farmer that heard the pistol, had his wife, and child, and nurse with him; there were two labourers at work in the lane, on the morning after the butcher work; there was a merry party at the cottage on the very night, singing and supping, while Weare's mangled carcase was lying darkening in its gore in the neighbouring field; there were hosts of publicans and ostlers witnesses of the gang's progress on their blood-journey; and the gigs, the pistols, even the very knives ran in pairs." Quod Tims, in Taylor and Hessey for Feb. 1, 1824-for here is the page, with which I now light my pipe. By all that is miraculous, these candles are in clusters. THE SHEPHERD. That's ae way, indeed, o' making murder ridiculous. But it's a lee. The gigs did not run in clusters-only think o' ca'ing ae gig passing anither on the road, a cluster o' gigs. Neither did the actors run in clusters, for Thurtell was by himself when he did the job. And then the pistols! Did he never hear before o' a pair o' pistols ?-Tims, if you were here, I wad thraw your nose for you, ye conceited prig. TICKLER, (reading.) "It seems as though it were fated, that William Weare should be the only solitary object on that desperate night, when he clung to life in agony and blood, and was at last struck out of existence, as a thing, single, valueless, and vile." He was, it seems, a bachelor. THE SHEPHERD. The only solitary object on that desperate night. Was nae shepherd walking by himsel on the mountains? But what kind o' a Magazine can that o' Taylor and Hessey be, to take sic writers as Tims? I hope they don't run in clusters. NORTH. Give me a bit of the sheet-for my segar, (Heaven defend me, the segars run in clusters,) is extinct. Let me see. Hear Tims on Thurtell's speech. "The solid, slow, and appalling tone in which he wrung out these last words, can never be imagined by those who were not auditors of it; he had worked himself up into a great actor-and his eye, for the first time, during the trial, became alive and eloquent, his attitude was expressive in the extreme. He clung to every separate word with an earnestness, which we cannot describe, as though every syllable had the power to buoy up his sinking life, and that these were the last sounds that were ever to be sent unto the ear of those who were to decree his doom! "The final word God! was thrown up with an almost gigantic energy,and he stood after its utterance, with his arm extended, his face protruded, and his chest dilated, as if the spell of the sound were yet upon him, and as though he dared not move, lest he should disturb the still-echoing appeal! He then drew his hands slowly back,-pressed them firmly to his breast, and sat down, half exhausted, in the dock." Omnes. Ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! ha! NORTH, (gravely.) "When he first commenced his defence, he spoke in a steady, artificial manner, after the style of Forum orators, but as he warmed in the subject, and felt his ground with the jury, he became more unaffectedly earnest, and naturally solemn-and his mention of his mother's love, and his father's piety, drew the tear up to his eye almost to falling. He paused-and, though pressed by the Judge to rest, to sit down, to desist, he stood up, resolute against his feelings, and finally, with one fast gulp, swallowed down his tears! He wrestled with grief and threw it! When speaking of Barber Beaumont, the tiger indeed came over him, and his very voice seemed to escape out of his keeping. There was such a savage vehemence in his whole look and manner, as quite to awe his hearers. With an unfortunate quotation from a play, in which he long had acted too bitterly, the Revenge! he soothed his maddened heart to quietness, and again resumed his defence, and for a few minutes in a doubly artificial serenity. The tone in which he wished that he had died in battle, reminded me of Keun's furewell to the pomp of war in Othello-and the following con sequence of such a death, was as grandly delivered by Thurtell, as it was possible to be! Then my father and my family, though they would have mourned my loss, would have blessed my name; and shame would not have rolled its burning fires over my memory!'" Omnes. Ha! ha! haha! haha! ha! ha! ha! THE SHEPHERD. Weel, I dinna ken the time I hae laucht so muckle. I'm sair exhausted. Gie's a drink. The English folk gaed clean mad a'thegither about that fallow. I never could see onything very remarkable about his cutting Weare's craig. It was a puir murder yon. There was that deevil-incarnate Gordon, that murdered the bit silly callant o' a pedlar on Eskdale muir, the ither year, and nae sic sugh about it in a' the papers. I forget it. The particulars? TICKLER. THE SHEPHERD. Oh! man, it was a cruel deed. He forgathered wi' the laddie and his bit pack, trudging by himsell among the hills, frae housie to housie; and he keepit company wi' him for twa haill days, ane o' them the Sabbath. Nae doubt he talked, and lauched, and joked wi' the puir creature, wha was a bonnie boy they say, but little better in his intellects than an innocent, only hafflins wise; and when the ane stapped, the ither stapped, and they eat bread thegither by different ingles, and sleepit twa nichts in ae bed. In a lanesome, place he tuk the callant and murdered him wi' the iron-heel o' ane of his great wooden clogs. The savage-tramper smashed in the skull wi' its yellow hair, didna wait to shut the bonnie blue een, put the pack over his ain braid shouthers, and then, demented as he was, gaed into the verra next town as a packman, and selt to the lassies the bits o' ribbons, and pencils, and thumbles, and sic like, o' the murdered laddie. I saw him hanged. I gaed into Dumfries on purpose. I wanted them no to put ony night-cap over the ugly face o' him, that we might a' see his last girns, and am only sorry that I didna see him dissecked. TICKLER. A set of amusing articles might, I think, be occasionally compiled from the recorded trials of our best British murderers. We are certainly a bloodthirsty people; and the scaffold has been mounted, in this country, by many first-rate criminals. NORTH. One meets with the most puzzling malefactors, who perpetrate atrocious deeds upon such recondite principles, that they elude the scrutiny of the most perspicacious philosophers. Butlers, on good wages and easy work, rise out of comfortable warm beds, and cut the throats of their masters quite unaccountably; well-educated gentlemen of a thousand a-year, magistrates for the county, and præses of public meetings for the redress of grievances, throw their wives over bridges and into coal-pits; pretty blue-eyed young maidens poison whole families with a mess of pottage; matrons of threescore strangle their sleeping partners with a worsted garter; a decent well-dressed person meets you on your evening stroll, and after knocking out your brains with a bludgeon, pursues his journey; if you are an old bachelor, or a single lady advanced in years, you may depend upon being found some morning stretched along your lobby with your eyes starting out of their sockets, the blue marks of finger-nails indented into your wizen, and your os frontis driven in upon your brain apparently by the blow of a sledge-hammer. THE SHEPHERD. Haud your tongues, haud your tongues, you twa; you're making me a' grew. TICKLER. A beautiful variety of disposition and genius serves to divest of sameness the simple act of slaughter; and the benevolent reader never tires of details, in which knives, daggers, pistols, clubs, mallets, hatchets, and apothecaries' phials, "dance through all the mazes of rhetorical confusion." Nothing can be "more refreshing" than a few hours sleep after the perusal of a bloody murder. Your dreams are such as Coleridge might envy. Clubs batter out your brains ;-your throat is filled with mud, as three strong Irishmen (their accent betrays them) tread you down seven fathoms into a quagmire. "You had better lie quiet, sir," quoth Levi Hyams, a Jew, while he applies a pigbutcher's knife to the jugular vein; you start up like Priam at the dead of night, and an old hag of a housekeeper chops your nose off with a cleaver. "Oh! what a pain methinks it is to die," as a jolly young waterman flings you out of his wherry into the Thames, immediately below Wellington Bridge. "Spare-spare my life, and take all I have!" has no effect upon two men in crape, who bury you, half dead, in a ditch. "He still breathes," growls a square thickset ruffian in a fustian jacket, as he gives you the coup-de-grace with a hedge-stake. THE SHEPHERD. Haud your tongues, I say. You'll turn my stomach at this dish o' tripe. The moniplies and the lady's hood are just excellent. Change the conversation. TICKLER. You are huddled out of a garret-window by a gang of thieves, and feel yourself impaled on the area-spikes; or the scoundrels have set the house on fire, that none may know they have murdered you; you are gagged with a floorbrush till your mouth yawns like a barn door, yet told, if you open your lips, you are a dead man; outlandish devils put you into a hot oven; you try to escape from the murderer of the Marrs, and other households, through a common-sewer, and all egress is denied by a catacomb of cats, and the offal of twenty dissecting-tables. "Hoize him into the boiler, and be dd to him ;" and no sooner said than done. "Leave off haggling at his wind-pipe, Jack, and scoop out his bloody eyes." NORTH. How do you like being buried in quick-lime in your back-court, heaving all the while like a mole-hill, above your gashes, and puddled with your slowoozing heart-blood? Is it a luxury to be pressed down, neck and crop, scarified like bacon, into a barrel below a water-spout, among dirty towels, sheets, and other napery, to be discovered, six weeks hence, in a state of putrefaction? What think you of being fairly cut up like a swine, and pickled, salted, barrelled, and shipped off at fourpence a-pound, for the use of a blockading squadron? Or would you rather, in the shape of hams, circumnavigate the globe with Cook or Vancouver? Dreams-dreams-dreams. "I wake in horror, and dare sleep no more!" TICKLER. Could it have been believed, that in a country where murder has thus been . carried to so high a pitch of cultivation, its 14 million inhabitants would have been set agape and aghast by such a pitiful knave as Jack Thurtell killing and bagging one single miserable sharper? Monstrous ! NORTH. There was Sarah Malcolm, a sprightly young char-woman of the Temple, that murdered, with her own hand, a whole household. Few spinsters, we think, have been known to murder three of their own sex; and Sarah Malcolm must ever stand in the first class of assassins. She had no accomplice ; her own hand held down the grey heads of the poor old women, and strangled them with unflinching fingers. As for the young girl of seventeen, she cut her throat from ear to ear, while she was perhaps dreaming of her sweetheart. She silenced all the breath in the house, and shut by the dead bodies; went about her ordinary business, as sprightly as ever, and lighted a young Irish gentleman's fire at the usual hour. TICKLER. What an admirable wife would Sarah have made for Williams, who, some dozen years ago, began work, as if he purposed to murder the metropolis! Sarah was sprightly and diligent, good-looking, and fond of admiration. Williams was called "Gentleman Williams," so genteel and amiable a creature did he seem to be; so pleasant with his chit-chat, and vein of trifling, peculiar to himself, and not to be imitated. He was very fond of children, used to dandle them with a truly parental air, and pat their curled heads, with the hand that cut an infant's throat in the cradle. Williams was a sober man, and no brawler; he preferred quiet conversation with the landlady and her family within the bar, to the brutal mirth of the tavern-boxes; and young and old were alike delighted with the suavity of his smile. But in his white great coat with his maul-or his ripping-chisel-or his small ivory-handled pen-knife, at dead of night, stealing upon a doomed family, with long silent strides, while, at the first glare of his eyes, the victims shrieked aloud, "We are all murdered !" Williams was then a different being indeed, and in all his glory. His rippingchisel struck to the heart the person whose cheek he had patted two hours before. Charles Martell himself, or the Pounder, smashed not a skull like Williams, the Midnight Malletteer-and tidily and tenderly did he cover up the baby with its cradle-clothes, when he knew that he had pierced its gullet like a quill. He never allowed such trifles long to ruffle his temper. In the evening, he was seen smiling as before; even more gentle and insinuating than . usual; more tenderly did he kiss little Tommy, as he prepared to toddle to his crib; and, as he touched the bosom of the bar-maid in pleasing violence, he thought how at one blow the blood would spout from her heart." NORTH. Sarah Malcolm was just the person to have been his bride. What a honeymoon! How soft would have been their pillow, as they recited a past, or planned a future murder! How would they have fallen asleep in each other's blood-stained arms! with the ripping-chisel below their pillow, and the maul upon the hearth! THE SHEPHErd. I wadna walk by myself through a dark wood the night, gin onybody were to gie me a thousand pounds. I never heard you in sic a key before. It's no right-it's no right! NORTH. What do the phrenologers say about Thurtell? I have not seen any of their Transactions lately. TICKLER. That he had the organ of Conscientiousness full, a large Benevolence, and also a finely developed organ of Veneration, just as might have been expected, they say, from his character For the phrenologer thinks that Jack would not have cheated an honest man, that he was another Howard in benevolence, and had a deep sense of religion. THE SHEPHERD. I canna believe they would speak sic desperate havers as that. TICKLER, (ringing the bell, enters Ambrose.) Bring No. II. of the Phrenological Journal, Mr Ambrose. You know where to find it. Perhaps the article I allude to may not yet be destroyed. NORTH. What can the Courier mean by talking such infernal nonsense, Tickler, about that murderous desperado, Surgeon Conolly? TICKLER. A puzzle. The Courier is an excellent paper-and I never before knew it in a question of common sense and common morality, obstinately, singularly, and idiotically in the wrong. NORTH. Why, the cruel villain would have shot others besides poor Grainger-and after his blood was cooled, he exulted in the murder of that unfortunate man. The gallows were cheated of Conolly, by a quirk of the law. TICKLER. Judge Best saw the thing in its true light; and the country is indebted to him for his stubborn justice. Why, the Courier says, that not one man in a hundred, but would have done as Conolly did.-Oh monstrous! is murder so very ordinary a transaction? NORTH. No more, no more. But to be done with it, listen to this:-"We are informed that this unfortunate gentleman has directed his friends to supply him with a complete set of surgical instruments, with all the new inventions, and |