oreseen having to go through such another week as the one just
over, I think it not impossible that before the arrival of the ensuing
Sunday, he might have afforded a little employment to that ancient and
gloomy functionary, a coroner, and his jury. At that time, however,
inquests of this sort were matter-of-fact and melancholy affairs enough;
which I doubt not would have been rather a _dissuasive_ from suicide, in
the estimation of one who might be supposed ambitious of the _eclat_ of
a modern inquest; where, indeed, such strange antics are played by
certain new performers as would suffice to revive the corpse, (if it
were a corpse that had ever had a spark of sense or spirit in it,) and
make it kick the coroner out of the room.[8] But to one of so high an
ambition as Tittlebat Titmouse, how delightful would it not have been,
to anticipate becoming (what had been quite impracticable during life)
the object of public attention after his death--by means of a flaming
dissertation by the coroner on his own zeal and spirit--the nature and
extent of his rights, powers, and duties;--when high doctors are
brow-beaten, the laws set at defiance, and public decency plucked by the
beard, and the torn and bleeding hearts of surviving relatives still
further agonized by an exposure, all quivering under the recent stroke,
to the gaping vulgar! Indeed, I sometimes think that the object of
certain coroners, now-a-days, is twofold; first, public--to disgust
people with suicide, by showing what horrid proceedings will take place
over their carcasses; and secondly, private--to get the means of
studying anatomy by _post mortems_, which the said coroner never could
procure in his own practice; which enables us to account for some things
one has lately seen, viz. that if a man come to his death by means of a
wagon crushing his legs, the coroner institutes an exact examination of
the structure of the _lungs_ and _heart_. I take it to be getting now
into a rule--the propriety whereof, some people think, cannot be
doubted--namely, that bodies ought now to be opened only to prove that
they ought not to have been opened; an inquest must be held, in order to
demonstrate that it need not have been held, except that certain fees
thereby find their way into the pocket of the aforesaid coroner, which
would otherwise not have done so. In short, such a coroner as I have in
my eye may be compared to a great ape squatting on a corpse, furiously
chattering a