least a dozen hunters, and two or three hacks, to ride to cover! Yet
no one in his senses would tax these things as luxuries; or would
blame his friend for getting into the King's Bench for their
indulgence. Even the most austere judges of the land, and the most
jealous juries of tradesmen, have borne ample testimony to the
reasonableness of this modern extension of the wants of life, by the
liberal allowance of necessaries which they have sanctioned in the
tailors' bills of litigating minors. This liberality, indeed, follows,
as consequence follows cause. Some one has found, or invented, a story
of a shipwrecked traveller's hailing the gallows as the sure token of
a civilized community. But the jest is by no means a _ben trovato_;
the member of gibbets being inversely as the perfection of social
institutions; and if any one object, that England, while it is the
best-governed country in Europe--its envy and admiration--is also a
hanging community _par excellence_, I must beg to remind him of the
intense interest which an English public feels in the victims of
capital punishment, in the Thurtells and the Fauntleroys; as also of
the universal conviction prevailing in England, that the gallows is a
short and sure cut to everlasting happiness. From all this, if there
is any force in logic, we must conclude, that hanging, in this
country, is only applied _honoris causâ_, as an ovation, in
consideration of the great and magnanimous daring of the Alexanders
and Caesars on a small scale, to whom the law adjudges the "palmam qui
meruit ferat." The real and true test of a refined polity is not the
gallows; but is to be found rather in such well-imagined insolvent
laws, as discharge a maximum of debt with a minimum of assets; and rid
a gentleman annually of his duns, with the smallest possible quantity
of corporeal inconvenience. When luxuries become necessaries,
insolvency is the best safety-valve to discharge the surplus
dishonesty of the people, which, if pent up, would explode in