science again awakened to good-development of repentance for his deed, in which the fear of impending punishment appeared to have no part. At the close of the case, when the defence of his advocate, who proposed the house of correction for an inde finite time as his punishment, was read to him for his ratification, he declared, 'I have shed blood, and have no claim for mercy. Should I be pardoned, I should be sent to Lichtenau, which would be worse for me. It is therefore better, even as a fearful example to others, to let the law have its course. I wish, however, before the completion of the sentence, to be allowed to see the wife and children of the murdered man, in order to entreat their forgiveness.' "On the 11th of December, 1818, the prisoner was found guilty of the murder by the criminal court, and sentenced to be beheaded; this judgment was confirmed in the second instance on the 20th of March, 1819. On the 22nd of April he was executed, and to the last moment the convict maintained his presence of mind and the appearance of true repentance. "Walliser appears to have been by nature a well-meaning, but light-minded young man, somewhat addicted to extravagance, and who, on being convicted of some petty larcenies, by which he incurred the penalty of imprisonment in the house of correction, first received his initiation to greater crimes in this establishment. To the inquiry of the examining judge, Why he had so long denied his crime?' he replied, "Several of the prisoners in the house of correction at Baireuth had agreed with each other never during their lives again to acknowledge any crime they might commit. I should not have been sent to the Bridewell,' said he; 'there I first became wicked.' Such a declaration at the foot of the scaffold sounds almost like an inculpation of the State." This last sentence is well worthy of serious thought. For the rest we must leave it to the reader to decide whether the prisoner was at last executed on better evidence than was at first produced against him, and whether the confession, except in the facts relative to the murder, of which the only one not testified to by witnesses is that of the manner in which it was effected, is not redolent of falsehood, including the supernatural visitations, if these were not perhaps the results of a disordered mind. Feuerbach himself, it is seen, disbelieved much of it. The whole narrative, we think, is a striking proof how little dependence can be placed on confessions made under the immediate prospect of death from a legal sentence; how strenuously the human mind revolts from any statement that tends to its own disgrace, and how it endeavours to envelope in a collocation of extenuating circumstances even those facts that it feels it is utterly useless to deny. CHEAP MAPS. Most of us can remember the time when a map, or a collection of maps, called an Atlas, was a rare thing in the hands of ordinary readers. The high price set on maps by those who published them made the sale limited, and of course uncertain. This again operated on the production of maps; for as the demand for them was supposed to be small, those who produced them made no great effort to furnish the market with a good commodity at a low rate. It is one of the great merits of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge that they perceived that a large demand for good maps only depended upon their being offered for sale at a low price; and that the increased sales, by giving a larger total of profit, would render it a safe speculation to expend the amount that was necessary for producing the best map that could be made. Good maps are now cheap, and they are more used in schools and by readers in general than they were before this Society commenced its operations. But though the use of maps has so greatly increased, we may reasonably expect that there will be a still greater demand for them when their advantages as aids to reading are better understood. Our form of government in this country makes us all politicians, and all thinking men take a lively interest both in measures of internal administration and in our foreign relations. A people whose empire extends over every part of the globe, who have made every land and every sea accessible to their commercial enterprise, feel the necessity of making themselves acquainted with foreign countries and what is going on in them. The newspaper is daily in their hands; and by these wonderful organizations of industry, almost every man who can read-and there are now comparatively few who cannot-has the opportunity of being acquainted with all the great political movements in the world, the most recent improvements of art or science, the state of commerce, and the, products and the wants of every civilized nation. Now there is nothing which fixes facts so firmly in the memory as the connecting them with localities, a truth which all men recognise and act upon. Maps assist us in doing this by presenting us with an outline of a country delineated with reference to the space which it occupies and its position on the surface of the earth. We see placed before us in epitome its coasts, mountains, rivers, and chief towns. From the knowledge that the warmer parts of the earth's surface are near the equator, and that as a general rule, subject however to some modifications, the climate grows colder as we approach to the poles, we see from the position of a place on the earth's surface what must be the nature of its chief products. We learn also what means of communication it has with other countries and with our own; what facilities of watercommunication; whether it has a near market for its products; and other like elements, on which depend the wealth and happiness of the people. Now without wishing to overrate in an absurd degree the utility of maps as aids to those who read newspapers, or in any other way wish to improve their political knowledge, it may be affirmed that their use as such aids is very imperfectly comprehended by most readers. Any one who will take up a good article in a newspaper which treats of a war in India, of a settlement in Australia or Van Diemen's Land, or the supply of grain which we may expect from foreign parts, will find that if he reads the article with a good map in his hand, he has a very different view of the matter from that which he would have if he read it without the map. By using the map the facts are assigned to their places and engraven on his memory. If the article is incorrect and absurd, which sometimes is the case, he will learn not to place unbounded reliance on assertions and deductions which are contradicted by the real facts. If a Member of Parliament (to imagine what some may think an impossible case) should be so daring as to speak of a province in the heart of Russia of an extent that bewilders the imagination, and a fertility that threatens the civilized world with an inundation of grain if the ports should be opened to receive the destructive flood, he will turn to his map, and laugh at the ignorance and impudence of a law-maker who ventures on assertions which are contradicted by a sixpenny map. He will discover too, that this region of fertility is so situated that the beneficial supply of overflowing grain must run a long course before it reaches the lips of the hungry expectant. If many of those who have been gulled by the prospectuses of bubble railroads had quietly set down with a map before them, and studied the projected lines with care, they would have seen that some of those lines offered no reasonable prospect of profit in the present state of the country; that the difficulties of construction and the cost would be certainly great, and could not accordingly be estimated; while the direction of the lines involved them in competition with other lines, and the places from and to, and through, which they passed offered no prospect of a profitable return. If cheap maps were offered for sale in every variety of form which shall suit the wants of readers, there is hardly a limit to the demand which might be called into activity. All people cannot afford to buy a large Atlas, and there are comparatively few who want a complete collection of maps simply for completeness' sake. But many persons want a few maps for their several purposes. The merchant who trades with foreign countries wants them for his counting-house; the newspaper reader wants them when any stirring news arrives from foreign parts; the schoolboy wants them for the purpose of instruction; and the man of careful and exact reading wants them whenever he turns his attention to any part of the habitable globe.* THE CARICATURIST'S PORTRAIT GALLERY. LORD NORTH (who, within a few years of his death succeeded to the Earldom of Guildford) became Prime Minister in 1770. He had previously filled high offices of administration. His daughter, Lady Charlotte Lindsay, has recorded that he would never allow his family to call him Prime Minister, saying there was no such thing in the British constitution. His ministry continued from 1770 to 1782; when he resigned, on a defeat in the House of Commons on the question of the American war. Of that unhappy war he maintained both the justice and the expediency. It is difficult in our own day to understand how a kind, just, and liberal statesman should have sanctioned what we must regard as an oppression on the part of a powerful country of its colonized children. But when we look at the difference in which such great subjects present themselves to the actors in passing events, and those who come after them, we may not the less admire the personal character of the minister, though we may condemn his politics. He was a minister of unsullied purity; of wonderful equanimity; of considerable talent; of rare wit. But he was assailed on every side by party virulence. He had an infirmity-some say it was a trick-of sleeping during a debate in the House of Commons. This habit is the subject of the very clever caricature which we copy in the next page. Two anecdotes from Lord Brougham's "Historical Sketches of Statesmen' will best illustrate this Portrait : 6 "If it would be endless to recount the triumphs of his temper, it would be equally so, and far more difficult, to record those of his wit. It appears to have been of a kind peculiarly characteristic and eminently natural; playing easily and without the least effort; perfectly suited to his placid nature, by being what Clarendon says of Charles II., a pleasant, affable, recommending sort of wit;' wholly unpretending; so exquisitely suited to the occasion that it never failed of effect, yet so readily produced and so entirely unambitious, that although it had occurred to nobody before, every one wondered it had not suggested itself to all. A few only of his sayings have reached us, and these, as might be expected, are rather things which he had chanced to coat over with some sarcasm or epigram that tended to preserve them; they consequently are far from giving an idea of his habitual pleasantry and the gaiety of thought which generally pervaded his speeches. Thus, when a vehement declaimer, calling aloud for his head, turned round and perceived his victim unconsciously indulging in a soft slumber, and, becoming still more exasperated, denounced the Minister as capable of * The more general diffusion of the best Maps, in connexion with subjects of passing interest, but of lasting importance, may probably be attained by the Weekly Issue of MAPS FOR THE TIMES,' now undertaken by the Publishers of this Magazine. sleeping while he ruined his country; the latter only complained how cruel it was to be denied a solace which other criminals so often enjoyed, that of having a night's rest before their fate. When surprised in a like indulgence during the performance of a very inferior artist, who however showed equal indignation at so ill-timed a recreation, he contented himself with observing how hard it was that he should be grudged so very natural a release from considerable suffering; but, as if recollecting himself, added, that it was somewhat unjust in the gentleman to complain of him for taking the remedy which he had himself been considerate enough to administer." Librain Table. LORD CAMPBELL'S CHANCELLORS. The Lives of the Lord Chancellors and Keepers of the Great Seal of England, from EVEN if it were less successfully executed than it is, we should be disposed to welcome this book for the sake of its subject, of the circumstances in which it has been produced, and of the spirit that generally pervades it. The lives of the Chancellors is a subject that happily combines a biographical with an historical interest. Two or three of the persons who have held the Great Seal have been the most remarkable persons of their day; and a very large proportion of them have had something extraordinary or out of the way, if not in themselves, at least in their fortunes. The single fact that each of them has risen to the highest place in the realm, but one, that can be held by a subject, is enough to excite some curiosity about them. In most cases this elevation has been achieved from a starting-point a considerable way down in society; in some cases, from one at its very base. So that the life of nearly every Lord Chancellor is the history of successful adventure, and of the transmutation of external circumstances; No. 15. 3 vols. 8vo., -partaking more or less of the sort of romance that belongs to the history of Whittington and his Cat, or of Napoleon Bonaparte. In the biographies of some of them we come upon revolutions as sudden and surprising as any metamorphosis in a pantomime. Then, combined with all this there is, as we have said, the, interest attaching to the permanent office; the history of the law, and, in some sort, of the government and of the nation. We agree, therefore, with Lord Campbell, that his subject is happily chosen, if not for a great historical work, at least for a book designed to be popularly interesting and also instructive. It is somewhat strange, however, that in congratulating himself on his good luck, and mentioning the sources to which he has been indebted for materials, he should not have noticed a work with nearly the same title as his own, 'The Lives of the Lords Chancellors, Lords Keepers,' &c., which appeared in 2 vols. 8vo., in 1708, and, as we learn from a recent article in the Law Magazine' (for Feb. 7, 1846), [KNIGHT'S PENNY MAGAZINE.] |