ith the bodily types or
instruments of these qualities to some tolerable degree of
perfectness.

4. If petty larceny be his offence, I exhort you, do not confound
meanness of crime with diminutiveness of stature. These things have
no connection. I have known a tall man stoop to the basest action, a
short man aspire to the height of crime, a fair man be guilty of the
foulest actions, &c.

5. Perhaps the offender has been guilty of some atrocious and
aggravated murder. Here is the most difficult case of all. It is
above all requisite that such a daring violator of the peace and
safety of society should meet with his reward, a violent and
ignominious death. But how shall we get at him? Who is there among us
that has known him before he committed the offence, that shall take
upon him to say he can sit down coolly and pen a dispassionate
description of a murderer? The tales of our nursery,--the reading of
our youth,--the ill-looking man that was hired by the Uncle to
despatch the Children in the Wood,--the grim ruffians who smothered
the babes in the Tower,--the black and beetle-browed assassin of Mrs.
Ratcliffe,--the shag-haired villain of Mr. Monk Lewis,--the Tarquin
tread, and mill-stone dropping eyes, of Murder in Shakspeare,--the
exaggerations of picture and of poetry,--what we have read and what
we have dreamed of,--rise up and crowd in upon us such eye-scaring
portraits of the man of blood, that our pen is absolutely
forestalled; we commence poets when we should play the part of
strictest historians, and the very blackness of horror which the deed
calls up, serves as a cloud to screen the doer. The fiction is
blameless, it is accordant with those wise prejudices with which
nature has guarded our innocence, as with impassable barriers,
against the commission of such appalling crimes; but, meantime, the
criminal escapes; or if,--owing to that wise abatement in their
expectation of deformity, which, as I hinted at before, the officers
of pursuit never fail to make, and no doubt in cases of this sort
they make a more than ordinary allowance,--if, owing to this or any
accident, the offender is caught and brought to his trial, who that
has been led out of curiosity to witness such a scene has not with
astonishment reflected on the difference between a real committer of
a murder, and the idea of one which he has been collecting and
heightening all his life out of books, dreams, &c.? The fellow,
perhaps, is a sleek, smug-