capital punishment of stealing from bleaching-
grounds.

Numerous, then, as the executions used to
be, they did not represent a tithe or hundredth
part of the amount of what was pronounced
capital crime; nor the number of
persons, who were sentenced to death
without the smallest intention of hanging
them. We never were so savage as our
laws have sometimes been. A short
time before the abolition of capital
punishment for stealing to the amount of forty
shillings in a dwelling-house, Lord Kenyon
sentenced a young woman to death for that
offence : whereupon she fainted, and the
judge, in great agitation, exclaimed, " I don't
mean to hang you! Will nobody tell her, I
don't mean to hang her ? " Of the pious
perjuries, who does not feel that the chief
crime was in the law, not in the administrator,
and that the law must bear the
heaviest weight of Sir Samuel Romilly's
objection to the "looking upon the evasion of
our criminal laws with so much favour, as to
regard the profanation of the name of God in
the very act of administering justice to men,
as that which is in some degree acceptable to
the Almighty, and as partaking of the nature
of a religious duty!"

There used to be —as we suppose, there are
still — a great many delicacies in the laws
having reference to homicide and burglary;
but in Sir Matthew Hale's time, the knotty
question of what was passable Latin for
burglarious and burglar in the framing of
indictments, was THE delicacy of the season.
More offenders escaped by the writing of
burgariter, or burgeuter, for burglariter, than
by proof of innocence; but, although these
errors were common and fatal flaws in an
indictment, it was ruled that burgulariter
was good Latin enough to serve the purposes
of law.

Dipping very much at random into the
amusing law sketch of Professor Amos,
we fall upon some of the subtleties of
homicide. Accidental homicide, if it arose
out of the doing of a lawful act, was held
excusable; if it arose out of a trespass, not a
larceny, was manslaughter; but if it arose out
of a larceny, was murder. Thus Mr. Eden put
the case a hundred years ago: ''A man,
shooting at a bird, and not using proper and
ordinary caution to prevent danger, unfortunately
happeneth to kill his neighbour. The guilt
of this man, in the eye of our law, and,
consequently, the proportion of his punishment,
will depend, partly on the nature, shape, and
of the bird; and partly on the intention
of the man with respect to the bird; but
will have no connection whatever with the
act of homicide. If the bird chanceth in
evidence to prove a wild pigeon, no man's
property, it will be excusable homicide;
if a tame fowl, and shot at for the amusement
or improvement of the marksman, it will be
felonious and manslaughter, because an
unlawful trespass on the property of another;
lastly, if the bird were private property, and
intended to be stolen, which must be
collected from the circumstances, it will be
murder." Hobbes, the philosopher, living in
Hale's time, expressed the law in this form: "If
a boy be robbing an apple-tree, and by some
chance fall therefrom, and break the neck of
a man standing underneath, the crime
consists in a trespass, to the damage, perhaps, of
sixpence. Trespass is an offence, but the
falling is none, and it was not by the trespass,
but by the falling, that the man was slain;
yet Coke would have him hanged for it, as if
he had fallen of malice prepense."

There was a case which combined, in a
suggestive way, questions of homicide and
burglary. A servant who had attempted to
murder his master by giving him fifteen
wounds with a hatchet, but without killing
him, was convicted and executed; not for
attempted assassination, but for constructive
burglary, because, in order to enter his
master's chamber, he had been obliged to lift
up the latch of a door.

It has been argued, and we are not sure
whether it ever was completely settled,
whether it was burglary to break a cupboard
open; and, of course, when the punishment
of felony was death, such a case as the
following was serious:—Some servants in
husbandry, left in charge of their master's team,
entered his granary by means of a false key,
and took out of it two bushels of beans which
they gave to his horses. Out of eleven judges
three were of opinion that this was no felony;
eight ruled for a conviction, some of the eight
formally alleging that the robbery by the
accused men was for their own gain, because
by better feeding of the horses, their own
labour would be lessened.

The idle subtleties that have been spent by
criminal lawyers upon the subject of theft,
could scarcely be seen to more advantage
than in the consideration of that element in
thieving, which consists in carrying the stolen
thing away; or, as the books called it., the
asportavit. Thus it was held that if a
prisoner removed a package from the head to the
tail of a waggon, the asportavit was
complete; but if he moved it only by lifting it
up where it lay, and standing it on end, for
the purpose of ripping it open, the asportavit
was not complete, because every part of the
package was not shown to have been moved.
The central point of it might be exactly where
it was before. This was understood by the
poet who declared the asportavit to be
complete as against him when " the Knave of
Hearts, he stole some tarts, and — took them
quite away."

There are one or two legal terms of which
the meaning is perhaps not generally known.
We need remind no one that lunacy is derived
from an idea that madness is connected with
the moon; but many may not be aware that
felony is derived from an idea that felons are