THE LOVE OF HORRORS.

WHEN I first arrived at the dignity of "taking in" a periodical on my own account, an event memorable in the annals of pocket-money and self-importance, I gave my allegiance, as if by instinct, to "the Terrific Register," a startling, harrowing publication, popular of old among housemaids, school-boys, and young apprentices, and I proceeded to quaff this cup of horrors, which for a few pence gave a marvellous amount of marvellous atrocities. I have often looked back with wonder at that remarkable expenditure, that wonderful investment of capital on some pages of blood and slaughter, murders and executions, which used to make my blood curdle in my veins. and my hair stand on end, as I waded from one tale to another, each seeking to out-herod the exciting enormities of the other. The love of being frightened was a strange and, to a school-boy, an expensive taste. I recollect distinctly the grim portrait of Lord Balmerino on the scaffold with his head half cut off, and his eyes made to stare and glare upon the reader with all that wildness and agony which a cheap woodcut with its peculiar mode of expressing the human countenance and human feeling is capable of conveying. It was indeed a monstrous spectacle, and kept me awake, I dare say, many a night; those ghastly features, with those large eyes fixed upon one, were most successfully done by the ferocious artist who held office in the Terrific Register, and slashed away with good broad lines to the periodical consternation of admiring though affrighted readers. One certainly "snatched a fearful joy," revelled in goose-skin sensations, had all the mysterious luxury of having one's whole nervous system shaken and upset, and, if it be not an Irish saying, enjoyed a good frightening from time to time with singular fortitude and perseverance. When "the new number" arrived, it was received with mingled feelings of pride and dread, and the operation of cutting the pages with their abominable type was undergone with a mixture of curiosity and fear.

I find, however, in looking out upon the world, that this love of horrors is not confined to the boyish state. No; the taste for the horrible seems to be largely indulged in at all periods of life. Madame Tussaud's "Chamber of Horrors,"

with its extra sixpence for the privilege of surveying the group of select detestables, proves the popular demand; the productive nature of the more barbarous murders to the daily press at a dull time of year, when Parliament is not sitting, is too well-known, while the "further particulars" which afford such scope for the inventive genius of "our own Reporter," are greedily gulped down. So also every execution, with its gaping throng of horror-seekers, watching every twitch of the convulsed frame of the dying wretch, and gloating from the crowded windows and house-tops with fiendish interest over his quivering limbs in the last awful struggle, still further proves the amazing passion for the terrible which is not to be satisfied with pictured woe, with agonies on paper, with groans and shrieks given in letter-press. The murderer who cried out to the crowd that was hurrying before him to Tyburn, 'Stop, my good friends; there will be no fun till I come,' was a shrewd observer of human nature, and saw plainly, though under such awful circumstances himself, the great attraction, "fun," as he called it, which is found in the most dreadful and revolting scenes.

Horror seems to be a sort of candle and we the moths; people get fascinated; the rope-dancer for instance, in the midst of his perilous feats, keeps our eye fixed upon him by a sort of spell, though we dread every moment to see him dashed to pieces on the ground. I heard from an eye-witness of the scene that when Courvoirsier had to endure the barbarity of the "condemned Sermon," a sermon happily in these better days of the Church very appropriately "condemned" itself, a carriage dashed up to the chapel, and a refined youthful lady with a light step glided across the pavement, and being before the time accidentally found her way to "the black bench;" on being bade to move she elegantly hurried into another seat, where she stayed out the horrid service, to see the fearful spectacle of human emotion in the face and form of one who might be called a dying man. What a strange need of excitement, of some strong stimulant; what a strong love of horrors, which could thus draw one outwardly so feminine, so gentlelooking, to such a scene.

Speaking of public executions, which I suppose are only continued on the ground of not lessening any of the popular amusements," or depriving the people of an accustomed, and let us add, depraving "sight," I think that little as Spain

is able to teach us on the subject of morals or religion, she did teach us a great lesson in the recent execution of the priest who aimed at the Queen's life. Instead of crowding to a show, and hurrying to the spectacle of his dying pangs, multitudes were seen either in the balconies that overhung the street through which he was drawn to the scaffold, or in the street itself, to fall down on their knees and pray for him as he passed, an act of mercy and Christian compassion which for once gave a glow to a public execution. This parenthesis, good reader, is worth remembering; there is matter in it to think about. Perhaps the bull-fights, with all their butcheries of man and beast, are in your mind as I am speaking of one good point in the Spanish character. Certainly the love of horrors is not altogether dead in Spain, when we find the gentlest Spanish women among the foremost to delight and feast themselves in such barbarous and bloody sports.

I suppose the natural love of horrors must be traced, in the first place, not to mere cruel curiosity but to the better root of sympathy. Whatever happens to man, especially of a painful kind, concerns man, who is born to pain. There is a sort of common property in pain, and we like to see how others go through the dark road before us. The shipwreck, with the shrieking sailor falling from the mast, and the infant washed from its mother's breast, makes us feel in imagination what the sailor and the mother felt as a reality, because we have the same nature as they, and the chord touched by them vibrates through our frame. The terrible realities of man's state, the darker, wilder, bloodier scenes, have an interest for man, as he feels himself a part of this disjointed breathing world, so woefully disjointed, in which these things happen. By nature, if not by personal act, he is connected with all the guilt and woe and suffering and tears.

But without digging up the root of these matters, we see plainly that this love of the terrible, however natural, and however traceable to as good a root as sympathy, is to be restrained, because by indulgence it ends not in enlarging but in destroying sympathy; we become mere gazers and lookers on, an excited but an inactive audience; and all our pity is but froth, mere goose-skin after all, useless exclamations of horror, which do nobody any good. To be perpetually horrified on our sofas and easy chairs, to be getting perpetually clammy and chilly, and as poor folks say "all of a tremble," without any conse

quent action, without any noble endeavour to rescue sufferers or to lessen suffering, without the chance or opportunity of it, is simply to wear a set of feelings to pieces without any possible result. It is a waste of feeling. We spoil the pump by pumping up the water which all runs down where it likes; and then when the house is on fire, the pump will not act, or there is no water in the well. It is worse than useless to raise emotions merely to let them sink down again.

The same sort of objection is often brought, and with much justice, against over-much novel reading. A novel is a strong stimulant; if we take nothing but strong stimulants, we exhaust the feelings, we wear them out, we produce mere dreamy, listless, inactive minds. We live in Dreamland; we have excellent sentiments, but indifferent actions. All the world is tame unless we stalk as heroes on the boards, and to be perpetually living among heroes is to make ourselves unfit for being really useful in ordinary times.

In some respects perhaps we are less fond of horrors than the preceding age. The Mysteries of Udolpho would hardly take now; sepulchral voices, clanking chains, dark passages, dungeons filled with bones, melancholy sounds issuing out of ivied cells, is a stock that has, we hope, been somewhat "sold off." French books do their best to keep up the taste, and with this addition, that they seem more deeply dyed with vice than those of English manufacture. May the whole herd of horror-mongers find it an ill trade, and the shoe-strings of murderers and their hats and walking-sticks cease to possess historic interest. There is enough to be done in the present age by all warm-hearted men for sufferers of all sorts, to prevent us playing with the terrible, or merely gazing at horrors with tremulous inactivity.

LAYARD'S LAST DISCOVERIES.

DISCOVERIES IN THE RUins of nineVEH AND BABYLON,

BY A. H. LAYARD, M.P.-Murray, 8vo. 1853.

FEW discoveries have ever, or so justly excited so much public interest as those which have been made within the last nine years upon the presumed site of the ancient Nineveh or have led to more careful and accurate investigation, on the part of those who had the good fortune to make the excavations, and by scientific students at home after a portion of the objects discovered had made their way to Europe. But a few years ago, the very site of Nineveh was doubtfully given in even the best European maps, nor were those, who had made the history of Western Asia their especial study, agreed, as to the position of one of the most celebrated of the eight primeval cities of Genesis. Yet a tolerably constant tradition in the East itself had pointed to the neighbourhood of the town of Mosul, as the real site of the ancient city and it was therefore not unnatural, when the excavations of the French consul at Khorsabad and of the English traveller at Nimroud had brought to light many sculptures of excellent workmanship, that men should imagine they had come at once on her remains, and on monuments, once the pride of Jonah's city of "three days' journey."

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Many things had doubtless concurred to obliterate the remembrance of Nineveh in a way which has not been the lot of other great cities, which, like her, once were, but have now passed away. Compared with those of Babylon, the records of Nineveh even in the days of her greatness, are few in number: the tenth chapter of Genesis tells of her foundation; the prophetical mission of Jonah affords a brief yet striking portrait of her state as she appeared to him;-Nahum and Zephaniah contain prophecies of her speedy destruction; while some scanty notices of her and her rulers are preserved in the books of Tobit and Judith. Yet, though we might have inferred the power and the splendour of the Assyrian capital from the evident greatness of such kings as Tiglath Pileser, Sennacherib and Esarhaddon, it is remarkable that, except in the case of Sennacherib, none of these princes are,