Italian statesmen in the 15th and 16th centuries. But long after the convulsions of these stormy times had been set at rest by the establishment of something like regular governments, the same crimes continued to prevail in domestic life, and that to the most incredible extent. At Rome, in particular, there reigned in succession, during the later part of the 17th century, two notorious sorceresses, known as La Spara and La Tofagna; who in the art nigros efferre maritos, might have rivalled Locusta herself. They were the inventors of the celebrated slow poison known throughout Europe as the Manna of St Nicholas of Bari; and their pride in their art, or their sympathy for unhappily allied persons of their own sex, was such, that they are said to have occasionally removed obnoxious husbands out of free generosity. Extraordinary as it may appear, nothing is more certain than that the attention of the Roman Government was first drawn towards these proceedings, partly by the unaccountable mortality among husbands, which was actually so great as to become matter of public notoriety long before the cause was known; and partly by the reports of the clergy, who, though bound by their vows not to betray individuals, could not help representing to the authorities the fearful number of domestic murders to which they were compelled to listen in the Confessional. Even after the existence of the practice had been proved, and the principal culprits detected, they contrived for several years to baffle the vigilance of the authorities by the aid of their clients; and it was not until the survivor of these Hecates had been executed-which could not have been till towards 1730-that the crime began to fall into disuse.

The peculiar prevalence of this practice among the Italians of the middle ages, is no doubt in a great measure to be attributed to that utter want of all chivalrous spirit-a want, be it observed, which we by no means consider an unmixed evil-which preyented them from feeling any shame in deceit, or any pride in confronting danger. We cannot, perhaps, altogether confirm the opinion of Mr Mackay, who believes that they considered such actions perfectly justifiable,' and that the Italians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries poisoned their opponents with as little compunction as an Englishman of the present day brings a lawsuit. Nor can we think the statements of contemporary writers, that Roman ladies put poison bottles on their dressingtables as openly . . . as modern dames use Eau-de-Cologne,' worthy of implicit or literal confidence. Moralists, we know, are apt to overshoot facts when they are rounding an indignant period about the wickedness of the age; and we must suppose that in Italy, as elsewhere, the generality of men had common

sense and common feeling enough to distinguish right from wrong. But we believe we may fairly say, that, two centuries ago, poisoning stood in Italy on the same footing as duels, or affairs of gallantry, in England. It was generally regarded as an act which strict morality indeed could never justify, but which circumstances might in a great measure palliate, and to which, at the very worst, no peculiar or indelible infamy was attached. Good men would speak of it with the manly indignation of Evelyn; commonplace men with the indulgent censure of honest Pepys; and profligate men with the boastful impudence of Wilmot and Wycherley. We think it probable, for instance, that an Italian of the sixteenth or seventeenth century would have incurred the universal suspicion of hypocrisy, by speaking of assassination by poison in the language which the coldest Englishman would use as a matter of course; and we have no doubt that his Quixotic inconsistency would have attracted the most contemptuous ridicule, if he had challenged to the field an enemy whom he had scrupled to remove by the sure and silent ministry of La Tofagna. The reason of this was, that neither treachery nor cowardice were despised by Italians as they are despised by Englishmen. The one was an immoral act, and the other a serious misfortune; but neither inferred what we consider ignominy. We should perhaps be wrong, if we were to speak of the men among whom such feelings were common, as the first impulse of contempt and indignation might dictate. It may be true-as we remember to have seen it most eloquently and ingeniously argued that the feeling which attaches unredeemed infamy to falsehood is the mere prejudice of our country; that every system of opinion which severs worldly dishonour from moral guilt is equally absurd and pernicious; and that a nation which weakly tolerates crimes of artifice, may be, on the whole, fully as wise and virtuous as a nation which weakly tolerates crimes of open daring. It is certain that the Italians of the middle ages, depraved as in many respects they were, were universally free from the savage indifference to bloodshed, the reckless thirst of military glory, and the brutal contempt of civilization, which were so common among the northern chivalry. It may even be doubted, whether these advantages were more than counterbalanced by the peculiar evils which accompanied them ; -whether the wickedness which Machiavel would have pardoned in a consummate statesman, was more atrocious in itself, or more dangerous to mankind, than that which the Black Prince would have pardoned in a valiant knight. To an Englishman, it certainly appears meaner and more degrading; but this is an association which an Italian of that day could not have comprehended, and by which he ought not to be judged. This is the

only reasoning by which a modern reader can persuade himself, that the crimes of the Borgias and Viscontis were, after all, the crimes of human beings; and that the wrath of Providence had not inflicted upon the whole generation which tolerated them, that monstrous moral deformity which it required a combination of extraordinary circumstances to develope in Nero and Domitian. Still it is in vain that, to borrow an expressive Americanism, we endeavour to realize such a state of opinion. It is in vain that we try to imagine ourselves living in a society where inscrutable dissimulation was the point of honour-where men would have felt for lago the reluctant admiration which we yield to Risingham or Balfour-and where the last infirmity of noble minds' was a tendency to adroit and ingenious deceit. Our prejudices revolt in spite of our efforts at candour; and we turn with sympathy, if not with admiration, to the barbarous warrior, whose ferocious passions and brute courage made him frank and open in his enmity, though perhaps from no higher motives than childish impatience of self-control, and blind indifference to danger.

In France and England the crime of poisoning, though occasionally practised, never became common. It was introduced into the former country by Catharine de Medici, who, as might have been expected from her character, was a warm and zealous patroness of the venefica of her native country. In her time, Paris abounded in druggists and perfumers-almost always, however, Italians by birth-who professed this atrocious mystery; and several of the great ladies and seigneurs, belonging to the Court of Henry III., became infamous for their dealings with such persons. But the crime was one of the few which found no sympathy among the fiery nobles of the day. Their fierce, ardent, bloodthirsty enmities were as different as possible from the calm and smiling hatred of an Italian. They carried on their quarrels, not indeed with honourable fairness, but in a spirit of proud and boastful bravado, which made them incapable of dissimulation and cajolery. It was enough for such a man as Sforza to know that his enemy was dead--that he should never see his face or feel his influence again. But Bussy or Bouthilliers would have thought this poor revenge. They would have longed to taunt and defy him, to give him the mortal blow with their own hand, and to see him expire at their feet. The most murderous bravoes of the day-men who, like the famous Baron de Vitaux, never scrupled to ensure their revenge by every advantage of numbers and weapons-were too haughty to effect it by conciliating their victims." We find that, when exasperated, they generally indulged their pride and passion by open threats and insults; though it is obvious that by doing so they must

often have lost the opportunity of more complete satisfaction. But the epidemic, which at this period soon became extinct, broke out again, about a century later, with a sudden violence which all the exertions of the Government could not for several years suppress. About the middle of Louis XIV.'s reign, the police of Paris found reason to suspect that poisoning was becoming a common crime in private life; and scarcely had their attention been attracted to the subject, when an accident gave them the means of detecting a domestic tragedy of the most frightful kind. We need not say that we allude to the crimes of the infamous Marquise de Brinvilliers. This unhappy woman belonged by birth to the noble family of D'Aubray, and was married to the Marquis in 1651. Some time after her marriage, she contracted a guilty attachment for a gentleman named St Croix, who was a man of the most abandoned character, and had been the pupil of Essili, a well-known Italian poisoner and alchymist. By the advice and assistance of this man, Madame de Brinvilliers deliberately put to death by poison her father and her two brothers, in order to obtain possession of the family estate. Her sister, who inherited upon their death as coparcener with her, would speedily have shared their fate if a vague suspicion of the truth had not induced her to leave Paris abruptly. The Marchioness then proceeded to plot against the life of her husband, in order to marry St Croix; but the execution of this project was secretly delayed by the latter, who felt, naturally enough, some repugnance to such a match. Just at this time, however, St Croix died suddenly in his laboratory; his body was identified; and the proofs against himself and his paramour, which had till then escaped the strictest search, were at once discovered. Madame de Brinvilliers escaped to England for a time; but, having rashly returned to the Continent, she was arrested at Liege, tried at Paris, condemned to death, and publicly beheaded on the Place de Grève in July 1676. This formidable example was, however, very far from producing the intended impression. The crime of poisoning continued and increased, until it became for the time more common than it had ever been in Italy. It was not confined to cases of deadly enmity or of urgent necessity. The hope of acquiring an inheritance, or of getting rid of a debt, was thought quite sufficient ground for its commission. The Cardinal de Bonzy, for instance, incurred the darkest suspicions in consequence of the rapidity with which certain life annuitants upon his property had died off. It was known that he had publicly thanked his stars' for his deliverance; and a notorious poisoner, with whom he was said to be intimate, was from that time known by the apt sobriquet of M. de Bonzy's star. These extraordi

nary events gave the utmost alarm and distress to Louis XIV. and his ministers. The severest measures were taken to detect and punish the guilty. Upwards of one hundred individuals suffered death upon conviction of the crime; and in particular, two midwives, who had long been the most eminent empoisonneuses in Paris, and one of whom was strongly suspected of having been concerned in the death of the beautiful Duchesse de Fontanges, were publicly burned alive in 1679. But it was some time before even these remedies produced their effect; and it was not until 1682-more than ten years after its first public appearancethat the crime could be considered as suppressed.

The few notorious murders by poison which occurred in this country, fortunately excited such universal horror and indignation, as to prevent the crime from becoming very common. The practice had, however, appeared as early as the reign of Henry VIII.; for we find that prince, with characteristic humanity and good sense, endeavouring to repress it by enacting that persons guilty of it should be boiled alive; and we believe that this punishment was actually inflicted upon a London citizen's widow, convicted of having murdered her husband. The worthless

Dudley, Earl of Leicester, is almost the only English statesman whom historical evidence, or even common report, has accused of the habitual use of such weapons against his enemies. Among the many dark and uncertain rumours which were current concerning the death of his unhappy countess, that which ascribed it to poison was the most generally credited. Several of his rivals at Court are said narrowly to have escaped the same fate; and his own death was believed to have been caused by inadvertently partaking of poison which he had prepared for his second wife. We need not enter into the particulars of the atrocious murder which disgraced the next reign. The death of Overbury-the conviction of the Earl of Somerset-and the pardon which was extorted from the King, contrary to his solemn and voluntary oath, by the mysterious influence of the murderer-belong to the public history of that shameful period. Fortunate it is for the memory of James, that the ludicrous absurdity of his personal demeanour has thrown into the shade the hateful vices of his life; and that the testimony of his indignant subjects has been in some measure forgotten in the good-natured ridicule of modern genius. Several other sudden deaths, which happened about the same period-those, for instance, of Edward VI., Henry Prince of Wales, and James I. himself-were attributed by vulgar suspicion to the same cause; but there appears to have existed no satisfactory proof in any of the cases, and it is certain that the practice of poisoning never became common in private life.