be inflicted in such a manner that it would affect the imagination and furnish a motive power to prevent the violation of the laws of God and man?

Transportation has hitherto been the next highest punishment after that of death. But this punishment, although in some respects, not a bad one, is remote, abstract, obscure. It has been thus described: "It is a promissory note of penalty-a threat that will be inflicted. The convict for transportation knows that he will have to take a long sea-voyage, and that some disagreeable business is possibly at the end of it. He also knows that he is assured of food, clothes, and lodging, for an indefinite period. The criminal by disposition lives only for the present; present pleasures are stronger than distant pains; instant retribution alone terrifies: the immediate terrors to a man condemned to transportation, probably consist in the ideas of sea-sickness and a parting from associates in vice. Seasickness and separation from the vicious, therefore, are the actual punishment for the felon."

The revival of the pillory appears to be universally objected to, as answering none of the ends of punishment, whether these relate to the amendment of the criminal, or the morals of the public.

For whipping, however, there is more to be said; and especially in such cases as the three attempts of a treasonable character of which we have been particularly speaking, and where a diseased passion for notoriety is believed to be one of the motives of these attempts, the new bill has recognized the propriety of introducing some counterdiscipline of a humiliating and degrading kind in the punishment. On the other hand there are politicians who sneer at this mode of chastisement, as though shooting at the Queen and stealing apples were on a par in turpitude.

Our code of punishments, and the scale of them, present curious enough points, but certainly nothing like the philosophy of that jurisprudence which would adapt its measures to the nature of the human mind, and the condition of society in the nineteenth century.

Capital punishments we object to, in every case, and for many reasons which we need not at present recapitulate. But then if the king of terrors is removed, there must be something substituted which possesses terrors as great, or nearly so, as capital punishment, yet free from all that renders this, at present, last measure of the law, inoperative in the majority of cases. Now, it has been suggested, that what is required is offered by a practice which prevails in some countries, viz. the employing of galley-slaves in the towns. In Florence, for instance, we are told, there are two classes of this sort of convictism;-there are those condemned for more than twenty years, who wear yellow breeches, a loose yellow, and a yellow cap; and those condemned for shorter periods, who wear similar clothes of red. They are chained two-and-two, and are seen performing the

part of scavengers and other coarse employment in the streets. Similar tasks are performed in London by contract. There are, however, harder labours, in which criminals might be employed without interfering with the legitimate business of the industrious; such as improvements in the beds of rivers, reclaiming land from the sea, who, so far from encroaching on wages in an overcrowded market, might even extend that market by preparing works which could not be undertaken without some such pioneers. "Dressed in a distinct and repulsive costume," says one theorist, "working in chains, engaged in constant and laborious occupations, fed on the coarsest and least palatable fare, just sufficient to sustain nature, the English galleyslaves, would be really a terror to evil-doers." This sort of punishment on the highways, and patent to all, instead of being removed to the hulks at Woolwich or Portsmouth, would offer a lesson, in the daily sight of incessant labour, that would reach the feelings and the imagination of every one, and be terrible to all.

Incessant and irksome labour is the only thing, it is suggested, that is universally dreaded. There are some reckless and depraved beings who, instead of fearing death, desire it. Solitary confinement is a horrible punishment, but in imagination will not deter a morose and unsocial being from committing crime. "But all mankind dread ceaseless and painful toil; and if the majority of criminals could be doomed for years or for a lifetime to labour, unmitigated in its severity, at a treadwheel, or any other employment, for as many hours as their strength would endure, and to be at all times gazed at through iron bars by the public, I think there would be scarcely any necessity to resort to the punishment of death; and the depraved would have opportunities of estimating and dreading the penalties of guilt, without having to wait, as they are now compelled to do, until they have been convicted and sentenced."

Dreadful punishment of the sort suggested would only be suitable perhaps as a substitute for that which is by the present laws capital; but even in that case it would serve as a visible sample of that which is endured in the penal colonies, should transportation still be retained in the criminal code. We add, in conclusion, an extract from the Spectator, whose views so often have a weight with us. "The majority of reflecting persons did not desire to see Francis hanged: none, we believe, is satisfied to have his punishment performed some time in 1843, at the antipodes, when all the criminal population will have forgotten him: had he been seen, the day after his trial, in mean costume, in chains, beginning the work of years in removing by slow and tedious degrees the black mud of the Thames, Bean might have perceived that the presenting an old pistol at the Queen was a play that would lead to unpleasant and not imposing consequences to himself: had the slight doubt of Oxford's sanity at the moment not prevailed, because the jury dared not con

demn him to an irretrievable fate, man's right to inflict which is not unquestioned, and had he been seen by Francis in his wanderings, earning his scanty and coarse meal by painful and disgusting toil, Francis would not have desired to share his 'provision:' had Oxford himself seen murderers thus employed, the sense of the disagreeable would probably have predominated in his mind over the éclat of a state trial, and in the background, fashionable life in Sydney, or at the worst, a public breakfast at Newgate and an oration from the scaffold. Such punishment, in short, might have been a terror, not a premium to high treason."

ART. XIV.-Poems. By the Rev. THOMAS WHYTEHEAD, M. A. Fellow of St. John's College, Cambridge; and Chaplain to the Bishop of New Zealand. London: Rivingtons.

THIS unpretending little book consists of a reprint of the "Empire of the Sea," and the "Death of the Duke of Gloucester," (two poems which obtained for their author the chancellor's medal during his under-graduateship at Cambridge) together with a few short pieces on different occasions;-the majority of them being of a devotional cast. The two former we need scarcely mention at any length, as they have been for some time before the public, and are generally admitted to be the best that the university has produced. On this behalf indeed, Mr. Whytehead has a peculiar claim to the gratitude of his Alma-Mater, for they are the only ones which will admit of a favourable comparison with those that do honour to the sons of her sister university;-thereby adding to her fame in the only quarter where it was not already proudly pre-eminent. A part of the cause and the effect may be unavoidable, and is no doubt to be found in the more abstract nature of the studies occupying so large a portion of the Cambridge undergraduates: but certain it is that the generality of prize-poems issuing from the

"brown o'erarching groves,

That contemplation loves,

Where willowy Camus lingers with delight."

are much inferior to those whose birthplace has been by the banks We readily acknowledge the truth of the maxim "nascitur, non fit, poeta," and for that reason we think the system adopted in our universities of a yearly prize for English poetry, to be competed for by voluntary candidates, the best that could be devised to foster poetic talent by tempting "unfledged poets" to try their "short excursions." Any idea of making poetry a part of the regular course of university education would be clearly absurd; but the present plan, without aiming at anything so utopian, may well be expected

to prove serviceable by calling into action the beginnings of a wish or power to "build the lofty rhyme." Hence it has often been matter of wonder to us, considering the exceeding beauty of many of the Oxford poems, that (with but two exceptions) their authors should never in after-life have sought to gather maturer laurels in the same field wherein their first efforts had been so successful. We should have expected that the first warblings of their muse amid the time-honoured towers of Oxford would but have been a prelude to higher and loftier strains as they acquired power and confidence by time and practice. We are glad to find a different course pursued by Mr. Whytehead;-The Empire of the Sea, and a great portion of the other, we have known by heart ever since they were published, and were consequently inclined to augur favourably of anything making its appearance from the same author; nor have we been disappointed, for several of the minor pieces altogether, and most of them in parts, contain poetry of a really high order.

The following lines, especially in the two last stanzas, remind us, more than anything we have lately seen, of the tone and manner of Sir Walter Scott; and that too, without having at all the appearance of an intentional imitation :—

FOR MUSIC.

Thou wert the first of all I knew,
To pass unto the dead,

And Paradise hath seem'd more true,
And come down closer to my view,
Since there thy presence fled.

The whispers of thy gentle soul,
At silent lonely hours,

Like some sweet saint-bell's distant toll,
Come o'er the waters as they roll

Betwixt thy world and ours.

Oh! still my spirit clings to thee,
And feels thee at my side;

Like a green ivy, when the tree
Its shoots had clasped so lovingly,
Within its arms hath died:

And ever round that lifeless thing

Where first their clusters grew,

Close as while yet it lived they cling,
And shrine it in a second spring

Of lustre dark and new!

The next, again, bears a strong resemblance to some of the best of Moor's Melodies, possessing at the same time a great advantage over them that of adding to its tenderness and affection a purity such as

has been but too seldom preserved by the bard of earthly love. It is, in every way, beautiful in the extreme.

ΤΟ

I know thou wilt never

Reproach me, my love,
When I meet thee for ever,

In that far land above,

Not a word of reproof,

Not a glance from thine eye,
Shall tell I have cost thee

A tear or a sigh.

I know thou forgivest

My rash broken vow;

Thou canst see where thou livest,

My bitter grief now.

But, O! shall I in Heaven,

When thou lookest on me,

Of myself be forgiven,

As I now am of thee?

Here is another ode "On Leaving Ambleside," after a summer vacation, apparently; and embodying in pleasing verse the writer's feelings at the approaching change of season, when the beauties on account of which he had chosen it for a summer retreat were beginning to yield to the sterner influence of winter.

TO F. W. F.

The lake hath called unto the river,
And the river unto the hill,
And down the headlong waters shiver,
From torrent, tarn, and gill;

I hear them cry all glancing by

Through the misty morning light;
"Thou hast seen us in our gentleness,
Now see us in our might."

And, Rowthay, thou the loudest there
Dost tell my time is past:

I may not see thee thus forswear
The gentle thing thou wast.
Type of all tranquil souls to me,

Was that calm course of thine;

Then let thy mood of strength be view'd
By other eyes than mine.

Dear friend, of blessed by-gone time,
Each stirring thought is telling,

And every crag we used to climb

Is some sweet memory's dwelling;