his child condemned to waste and wither into
idiotcy at the mother's breast.

There was no doubt equal credulity
concerning antidotes, and use was made of charms
as a protection against poisoning or sorcery.
But if the charms gave some sense of security,
they also did much to keep fear alive by
serving constantly as technical reminders of
the danger.

Let it not be said, therefore, of any poisoner
who lives or has lived in our day, that he or
she carries our minds back to the days of
Borgia or Brinvilliers. Of all the old times
that are gone, there is none gone more
completely and more finally than the old time
when to take heed against poison was one of
the waking thoughts common to all; when
deadly poison, it was thought, might be
administered either by look or word as well
as by deed, and when life was made uneasy by
the constant rising of a horrible mistrust. For
centuries this terror was an element of social
life in Europe, and if it was greater than the
danger, yet the danger was not small. Death
feuds were frequent, lust of gain was held less
in check than it is now; a man's life was of less
account than we now make it, and the means
of positive detection were so utterly
inadequate, that a remote possibility of rack
and stake, when weighed against the certainty
of gain, pressed little on the mind of any
criminal. "See!" said the Marchioness
Brinvilliers, when she came home one evening
elated from a festival, and was in her own
chamber with her waiting-maid; " see," she
said, taking up a little box, " I keep here my
vengeance on my enemies—small as the casket
is, it is full of rich inheritances! " Parricide,
fratricide, she only waited detection; but her
torture, her public humiliation, and her
execution, by both sword and fire, did not
abate the crime, and the Chambre Ardente—
established afterwards for the detection and
the execution of sharp justice upon poisoners—
found women engaged in business among
rich and noble ladies, who ran up small bills
for articles of sorcery and poison. And that
happened towards the close of the seventeenth
century, when increasing knowledge had
already told with some effect against the
vague fears that attend on ignorance and
superstition.

For, by the growth of knowledge, hitherto
the history of Europe, as regards these
subjects, has been wonderfully changed; and from
its growth hereafter greater changes will
result. The development of the natural
sciences operated first in the most direct way
by dispelling, one by one, the theories of
nature on which superstition rested; and on
which, indeed, it had in former times a right
to rest. The superstition of which those
disjointed fragments that remain among our
untaught classes now seem to be inconsequent
absurdities, all belonged once to a
system which the greatest thinkers of
antiquity had formed. All belonged to a
speculative theory of the universe, which in its time
was worthy of the men who framed it.

Among the untaught outcasts of society in
London alleys, or in rustic hovels, scholars may
yet hear snatches of what they have read in
Plato or in Aristotle, or of what has
entertained them in the works of Pliny. As the
truths of nature were unfolded, one by one,
the theories constructed to explain its mysteries
disappeared, and with them went faith
in the subtle powers of the sorcerer. There
remained only the substantial poison to be
dreaded.

If a mass of ignorance had not maintained
some of the old vague terror, there was
certainly a time when credulity would have
been changed for a too easy confidence; when
the old world of mystery born out of
speculation was left out of sight, and the new
world of mystery acquired by long experience
and study, had indeed been entered, but was
unexplored. Science advances, and the truths
discovered, the results achieved by use of
such truths, prove to be more wonderful
than anything that ancient sages had
supposed in place of them, or any magical effects
said to be possible as the result of acting on
such suppositions. We have gone back, in
one sense, to the old days of constant watching
against poison. We are conscious of
more poisoning than ever men were in the
worst age of Italian profligacy. We dread it
of nights. We see it streaming to us on the
breath of a companion. We inquire actively
as to its presence in our bread, and in our
wine, and in our sauce. We clamour against
poisoned wells. These things were done
of old, because of ignorance; they are done
now, because of knowledge. It may be
said that the extremes have met, yet
certainly there is no likeness between them.
Our modern dread of poison, in as far as it is
general involves no fear of hatred or malice,
and tends to the opposite of all uncharitableness.
We see little or nothing of what our
forefathers saw, and they saw little or nothing
of what we now see. All that we fear with
reason, they had in a worse form, and for
want of knowledge feared it not. They
breathed foul air in all their habitations,
heaped up filth in all their streets; they
drank infected water, breathed miasma, ate
unwholesome food, and saw no harm in any
of these things. Their fears have gone from
us. We dine or sup with friends, and are at
ease. We may think there is prussic acid in
the custard; but we do not want to question
our friend with the thumbscrew, or to put
him on the rack for that. Detection of
poisoning meant only in old times vengeance
upon some body and a putting to death; now
it leads only to mercy, and the saving of
much life. I know no better monument
commemorating such a truth as this than
Broad Street Pump.

The Broad Street pump is in the
neighbourhood of Seven Dials, on the edge of one