SANGUINARY EPICURISM.
THERE is a curious alchemy in human nature which enables men to convert the most repulsive aliments into dainties. Some have been known to feed on poisons. It is with the moral as with the physical part of our being. Nero is said to have wished that he had never learned to write when he signed his first death-warrant ; and Robespierre gave up a judgeship rather than pronounce a sentence of death. They became in time perfect gourmands in what was at first so nauseous to them.
Such rulers as those we have named have vulgar voracious appetites for slaughter. They feed lustily, like ploughmen. But there are men with delicate and fastidious appetites, who prefer tiny tit& .bits, and linger over their repast to proleag the plevagre: The former class are the gluttons, the latter the epicures of death-punish/nerds. It strikes us that the present Secretary of State for the Home Department occasionally betrays symptoms of being a little of the epicure in this respect. _Par exemple—A Minister may be justified for habitually allowing the law to take its course, even in the case of death-punishments : but in such cases prompt and stern decision is mercy. Now there is at present a woman—Mary Sheming—lying under sentence of death at Ipswich. She was ordered for execution on Tuesday last ; and three men are ordered for execution on Saturday the 25th. The authorities of Ipswich—apparently from a wish to bolt the whole of their share of the nauseous morsel of death-punishment at once—petitioned that Mary Sheming might be respited till the day fixed for the execution of the three men. The Home Secretary has respited her till the 1 lth ; and the Ipswich newspaper intimates a hope that he may yet be moved to grant a further respite. There is something in this doling out of respites by halves even more cruel than prompt refusal. The criminal is kept in a prolonged alternation of hope and fear. The Secretary plays with her as a cat with a mouse, when, in the very wantonness of secure possession, the brute cuffs it from side to Bide and delays the finishing-stroke. He resembles the bonvivant taking smaller and smaller sips of his last glass as he gets nearer the bottom. Sir James hesitates like a schoolboy doubtful whether to make two bites of his cherry or reserve it for one rich mouthful : he cannot decide whether it is better to divide the pleasure by having two executions, or to reserve the whole four culprits for one glorious full-gorged hanging-match. The question is a difficult one and accordingly he has taken a fortnight to make up his mind. This is making the most of a treat.
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