The Not of an English Opium-Eater | Page 2

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are summoned to the spectacle of a great fire, undoubtedly the first
impulse is--to assist in putting it out. But that field of exertion is very
limited, and is soon filled by regular professional people, trained and
equipped for the service. In the case of a fire which is operating upon
private property, pity for a neighbor's calamity checks us at first in
treating the affair as a scenic spectacle. But perhaps the fire may be
confined to public buildings. And in any case, after we have paid our
tribute of regret to the affair, considered as a calamity, inevitably, and
without restraint, we go on to consider it as a stage spectacle.
Exclamations of--How grand! How magnificent! arise in a sort of
rapture from the crowd. For instance, when Drury Lane was burned
down in the first decennium of this century, the falling in of the roof
was signalized by a mimic suicide of the protecting Apollo that
surmounted and crested the centre of this roof. The god was stationary
with his lyre, and seemed looking down upon the fiery ruins that were
so rapidly approaching him. Suddenly the supporting timbers below
him gave way; a convulsive heave of the billowing flames seemed for a
moment to raise the statue; and then, as if on some impulse of despair,
the presiding deity appeared not to fall, but to throw himself into the
fiery deluge, for he went down head foremost; and in all respects, the
descent had the air of a voluntary act. What followed? From every one
of the bridges over the river, and from other open areas which
commanded the spectacle, there arose a sustained uproar of admiration
and sympathy. Some few years before this event, a prodigious fire
occurred at Liverpool; the Goree, a vast pile of warehouses close to one
of the docks, was burned to the ground. The huge edifice, eight or nine
stories high, and laden with most combustible goods, many thousand
bales of cotton, wheat and oats in thousands of quarters, tar, turpentine,
rum, gunpowder, &c., continued through many hours of darkness to
feed this tremendous fire. To aggravate the calamity, it blew a regular
gale of wind; luckily for the shipping, it blew inland, that is, to the east;
and all the way down to Warrington, eighteen miles distant to the
eastward, the whole air was illuminated by flakes of cotton, often
saturated with rum, and by what seemed absolute worlds of blazing
sparks, that lighted up all the upper chambers of the air. All the cattle
lying abroad in the fields through a breadth of eighteen miles, were
thrown into terror and agitation. Men, of course, read in this hurrying

overhead of scintillating and blazing vortices, the annunciation of some
gigantic calamity going on in Liverpool; and the lamentation on that
account was universal. But that mood of public sympathy did not at all
interfere to suppress or even to check the momentary bursts of
rapturous admiration, as this arrowy sleet of many-colored fire rode on
the wings of hurricane, alternately through open depths of air, or
through dark clouds overhead.
Precisely the same treatment is applied to murders. After the first
tribute of sorrow to those who have perished, but, at all events, after the
personal interests have been tranquillized by time, inevitably the
scenical features (what aesthetically may be called the comparative
_advantages_) of the several murders are reviewed and valued. One
murder is compared with another; and the circumstances of superiority,
as, for example, in the incidence and effects of surprise, of mystery,
&c., are collated and appraised. I, therefore, for my extravagance, claim
an inevitable and perpetual ground in the spontaneous tendencies of the
human mind when left to itself. But no one will pretend that any
corresponding plea can be advanced on behalf of Swift.
In this important distinction between myself and the Dean, lies one
reason which prompted the present writing. A second purpose of this
paper is, to make the reader acquainted circumstantially with three
memorable cases of murder, which long ago the voice of amateurs has
crowned with laurel, but especially with the two earliest of the three,
viz., the immortal Williams' murders of 1812. The act and the actor are
each separately in the highest degree interesting; and, as forty-two
years have elapsed since 1812, it cannot be supposed that either is
known circumstantially to the men of the current generation.
Never, throughout the annals of universal Christendom, has there
indeed been any act of one solitary insulated individual, armed with
power so appalling over the hearts of men, as that exterminating
murder, by which, during the winter of 1812, John Williams in one
hour, smote two houses with emptiness, exterminated all but two entire
households, and asserted his own supremacy above