unless raised and enriched by
a warm, sanguinary coloring, has too much of the naked air of the savage
school; as if the deed were perpetrated by a Polypheme without science,
premeditation, or anything but a mutton bone. However, I am chiefly pleased
with the improvement, as it implies that Milton was an amateur. As to
Shakspeare, there never was a better; as his description of the murdered
Duke of Gloucester, in Henry VI., of Duncan's, Banquo's, &c., sufficiently
proves.

The foundation of the art having been once laid, it is pitiable to see how
it slumbered without improvement for ages. In fact, I shall now be obliged
to leap over all murders, sacred and profane, as utterly unworthy of
notice, until long after the Christian era. Greece, even in the age of
Pericles, produced no murder of the slightest merit; and Rome had too
little originality of genius in any of the arts to succeed, where her
model failed her. In fact, the Latin language sinks under the very idea of
murder. "The man was murdered;"--how will this sound in Latin? _Interfectus
est, interemptus est_--which simply expresses a homicide; and hence the
Christian Latinity of the middle ages was obliged to introduce a new word,
such as the feebleness of classic conceptions never ascended to. _Murdratus
est_, says the sublimer dialect of Gothic ages. Meantime, the Jewish,
school of murder kept alive whatever was yet known in the art, and
gradually transferred it to the Western World. Indeed the Jewish school was
always respectable, even in the dark ages, as the case of Hugh of Lincoln
shows, which was honored with the approbation of Chaucer, on occasion of
another performance from the same school, which he puts into the mouth of
the Lady Abbess.

Recurring, however, for one moment to classical antiquity, I cannot but
think that Catiline, Clodius, and some of that coterie, would have made
first-rate artists; and it is on all accounts to be regretted, that the
priggism of Cicero robbed his country of the only chance she had for
distinction in this line. As the _subject_ of a murder, no person could
have answered better than himself. Lord! how he would have howled with
panic, if he had heard Cethegus under his bed. It would have been truly
diverting to have listened to him; and satisfied I am, gentlemen, that he
would have preferred the _utile_ of creeping into a closet, or even into a
_cloaca_, to the _honestum_ of facing the bold artist.

To come now to the dar