reasonably—for they are very reasonable, if
you will discuss a matter with them—to more
considerate and wise conclusions.

This is a disagreeable intrusion! Here is a
man with his throat cut, dashing towards me
as I lie awake! A recollection of an old
story of a kinsman of mine, who, going home
one foggy winter night to Hampstead, when
London was much smaller and the road
lonesome, suddenly encountered such a figure
rushing past him, and presently two keepers
from a madhouse in pursuit. A very
unpleasant creature indeed, to come into my
mind unbidden, as I lie awake.

—The balloon ascents of last season. I
must return to the balloons. Why did the
bleeding man start out of them? Never
mind; if I inquire, he will be back again.
The balloons. This particular public have
inherently a great pleasure in the contemplation
of physical difficulties overcome; mainly,
as I take it, because the lives of a large
majority of them are exceedingly monotonous
and real, and further, are a struggle against
continual difficulties, and further still,
because anything in the form of accidental
injury, or any kind of illness or disability is so
very serious in their own sphere. I will explain
this seeming paradox of mine. Take the case
of a Christmas Pantomime. Surely nobody
supposes that the young mother in the pit
who falls into fits of laughter when the baby
is boiled or sat upon, would be at all diverted
by such an occurrence off the stage. Nor is
the decent workman in the gallery, who is
transported beyond the ignorant present by
the delight with which he sees a stout gentleman
pushed out of a two pair of stairs
window, to be slandered by the suspicion
that he would be in the least entertained
by such a spectacle in any street in London,
Paris, or New York. It always appears
to me that the secret of this enjoyment
lies in the temporary superiority to the
common hazards and mischances of life; in
seeing casualties, attended when they really
occur with bodily and mental suffering, tears,
and poverty, happen through a very rough
sort of poetry without the least harm being
done to any one—the pretence of distress in
a pantomime being so broadly humorous as
to be no pretence at all. Much as in the
comic fiction I can understand the mother with
a very vulnerable baby at home, greatly relishing
the invulnerable baby on the stage, so in
the Cremorne reality I can understand the
mason who is always liable to fall off a
scaffold in his working jacket and to be
carried to the hospital, having an infinite
admiration of the radiant personage in
spangles who goes into the clouds upon a
bull, or upside down, and who, he takes it for
granted—not reflecting upon the thing—has,
by uncommon skill and dexterity, conquered
such mischances as those to which he and his
acquaintance are continually exposed.

I wish the Morgue in Paris would not
come here as I lie awake, with its ghastly
beds, and the swollen saturated clothes
hanging up, and the water dripping, dripping
all day long, upon that other swollen saturated
something in the corner, like a heap of
crushed over-ripe figs that I have seen in
Italy! And this detestable Morgue comes
back again at the head of a procession of
forgotten ghost stories. This will never do. I
must think of something else as I lie awake;
or, like that sagacious animal in the United
States who recognised the colonel who was
such a dead shot, I am a gone 'Coon. What
shall I think of? The late brutal assaults.
Very good subject. The late brutal assaults.

(Though whether, supposing I should see,
here before me as I lie awake, the awful
phantom described in one of those ghost
stories, who, with a head-dress of shroud, was
always seen looking in through a certain glass
door at a certain dead hour—whether, in such
a case it would be the least consolation to me
to know on philosophical grounds that it was
merely my imagination, is a question I can't
help asking myself by the way.)

The late brutal assaults. I strongly question
the expediency of advocating the revival of
whipping for those crimes. It is a natural
and generous impulse to be indignant at the
perpetration of inconceivable brutality, but I
doubt the whipping panacea gravely. Not
in the least regard or pity for the criminal,
whom I hold in far lower estimation than a
mad wolf, but in consideration for the general
tone and feeling, which is very much improved
since the whipping times. It is bad for a
people to be familiarised with such punishments.
When the whip went out of Bridewell,
and ceased to be flourished at the
cart's tail and at the whipping post, it began
to fade out of madhouses, and workhouses,
and schools, and families, and to give place
to a better system everywhere, than cruel
driving. It would be hasty, because a few
brutes may be inadequately punished, to
revive, in any aspect, what, in so many aspects,
society is hardly yet happily rid of. The
whip is a very contagious kind of thing, and
difficult to confine within one set of bounds.
Utterly abolish punishment by fine—a
barbarous device, quite as much out of date as
wager by battle, but particularly connected
in the vulgar mind with this class of offence
—at least quadruple the term of imprisonment
for aggravated assaults—and above all let us,
in such cases, have no Pet Prisoning,
vainglorifying, strong soup and roasted meats,
but hard work, and one unchanging and
uncompromising dietary of bread and water,
well or ill; and we shall do much better than
by going down into the dark to grope for the
whip among the rusty fragments of the rack,
and the branding iron, and the chains and
gibbet from the public roads, and the weights
that pressed men to death in the cells of
Newgate.

I had proceeded thus far, when I found I