The Foreign Quarterly Review

ART. I.- Actenmässige Darstellung merkwürdiger Verbrechen. Von Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach. (Remarkable Criminal Trials from the Original Documents. By Anselm Chevalier von Feuerbach.) 2 Bde. Giessen. 1828, 1829. Svo. Ir is a story told, we think, of George Selwyn, that after remonstrating with a friend on the bad taste of being present at an execution which was expected to take place in the course of the day, he was shortly afterwards detected in a slouched hat and great coat in the immediate neighbourhood of the scaffold. The case is much the same with the perusal of the annals of crime; all the world declaims against such reading, and yet all the world secretly yields to its deep and fascinating interest. We are not of course speaking of such publications as the Newgate Calendar, or similar collections, where the attention of the reader is confined to the more immediate details of the crime itself, and to the catastrophe of the tragedy, omitting all the motives or struggles which had occupied the preceding acts,-every thing in short which gives a moral interest to what was in itself painful or degrading, Such publications, we are satisfied, are calculated only to demoralize, or at best to furnish a coarse and vulgar excitement to the mind. But the case is otherwise, when the records of crime, selected and arranged by men of legal skill and philosophical acuteness, are laid before the public, in such a shape as to form so many accurate and continuous pictures of the human mind under circumstances of strong excitement and temptation, to illustrate the mode in which crime is stripped of its disguises and brought forth to light and punishment, and to reduce to some order the anomalies or difficulties which embarrass the science of evidence. It is in itself an operation of no common interest, to watch the progress of a chain of evidence from its commencement to its conclusion; to see how, link by link, it stretches itself out before the eye of the spectator, first feeble and disjointed, then gradually becoming firmer and more compact; how at times it seems suddenly to snap asunder, and all the past labour of the legal anvil to

VOL. VIII. NO. XVI.

be rendered void; how some unexpected accident again reclasps the fragments, and knits the whole together, till at last, complete in all its parts, it winds itself with an iron grasp round the accused. But a far more interesting exhibition is the picture which such a work exhibits of the secret counsels of the heart, disclosed with a nakedness of truth which we look for in vain in works of fiction, and with that minuteness and certainty which history can but seldom obtain. For history in general is but a distant echo of the vague opinions and conjectures of the time as to events, the true motives of which were concealed, perhaps, scarcely rendered clear to the actors themselves by any self examination, and, at best, suspected only, not avowed or established. "Where the most complete historical account," says Schiller, in his preface to the intended republication of Guyot de Pitaval's Causes Célèbres, "fails to afford us any satisfactory information as to the ultimate causes of a particular event, or the true motives of the actors, the records of a criminal proceeding often reveal to us their inmost thoughts, and expose the most secret machinations of evil to the day." It is, indeed, the torch of justice, which, when held up by a steady and experienced hand, best illuminates the dark chambers and winding avenues of the mind; and its strong arm which most effectually drags forth to the light the passions by which they are haunted: a grisly host-like that which Mammon showed to Sir Guyon before the gates of Pluto.

"On the other side, in one consort there sate,

Cruel Revenge and rancorous Despight,
Disloyal Treason and heart-burning Hate;
And gnawing Jealousy, out of their sight,

Sitting alone, his bitter lips did bite;

And trembling Feare still to and fro did fly,
And found no place where safe he shroud him might;
Lamenting Sorrow did in darkness lie,

And Shame his ugly face did hide from human eye.”

In the contemplation of this play of the passions there painted in all the terrors of truth, those who feel how much all of us partake of one common and fallible nature, and how little even the best of us can understand what is in us, or answer for our principles under the pressure of strong temptation, must find subjects for meditation, or lessons of moral and religious wisdom. Sometimes they may watch the slow growth of crime in a mind naturally gentle and benevolent, but warped by misfortune or disappointment; in others, where the soil was of a more noxious kind, they may see it, like Satan's palace in Pandemonium, rising at once "like an exhalation;" and sometimes too, as if to refute the old notion that all crimes are gradual, and that no one has at once

reached the extremity of guilt, they will witness instances where, in beings who had through life preserved a high character, and apparently with justice, some sudden convulsion, shaking the mind from its balance, has developed the lurking principle of evil: as strange and frightful sights" that in the ooze were bedded," and over which the waters of the ocean in its ordinary flow had rolled tranquilly for years, may be suddenly stirred up from the bottom by an earthquake, and cast upon the shore.

This species of interest will be found to a certain extent to attach to all collections of Trials, arranged upon any refined or comprehensive principle; but it is chiefly in those of the Continent that materials suited to the purposes of philosophical observation or classification are found in sufficient abundance, or with sufficiently satisfactory and circumstantial details. In as far certainly as regards the investigation of motives, or the gratification of that curiosity with which such aberrations of mind are regarded by the student of human nature, they manage these things better in France and Germany; though it may be much more doubtful whether, in practice, their system of judicial investigation is not carried to a length inconsistent with justice to the prisoner, or the purity of the law itself. In England no attention is paid to any thing beyond the circumstances directly connected with the commission of the crime; what has been heard or seen by the witnesses present at the time or immediately before; and if these throw no light upon the motives of the prisoner, the law takes no further steps to clear up the doubt. No inferences are drawn from the past to the present; the former life of the prisoner, his general character, habits, and inclinations are excluded from consideration. But in Germany, with which we have at present to do, the inquiry stretches backward over an indefinite period; the accused is traced perhaps from his cradle to his prison; his early passions and youthful errors, as well as his matured opinions and habits, are all considered as so many circumstances from which presumptions as to his guilt or innocence of the particular charge against him may be drawn. In this way, although much must necessarily be left to the discretion, good-sense, and perspicacity of the judge, whether any or what weight is to be given to such presumptions, and although instances of gross abuse arising from judicial blindness or wilful prejudice do not unfrequently occur, from the admission of much that is not evidence at all in any legitimate sense, it cannot be denied that the ample and circumstantial detail which is the result of these comprehensive examinations gives to the annals of German Criminal Jurisprudence— as contributions to the natural history of crime-a completeness and connection, a regular and progressive interest, which it is in

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