tery which may exercise the imaginations of posterity, whenever posterity shall take the trouble (as doubtless will one day be the case) to inquire into them. But, for the satisfaction of the botanists and accountants, we will so far declare it, as that, notwithstanding our dissent from Dr Ferriar, we are still not altogether of the persuasion of another physician, eminent in his day, whose words we nevertheless think very fit for the winding-up of this desultory treatise.
“It is a riddle to me,” says Sir Thomas Brown (Religio Medici 6th edition, p. 24.) “how so many learned heads should so far forget their metaphysics, and destroy the ladder and scale of creatures, as to question the existence of spirits. Those that, to confute their incredulity, desire to see apparitions, shall questionless never behold any; the devil hath them already in a heresie as capital as witchcraft, and to appear to them were but to convert them.”
EXTRACTS FROM GOSSCHEN’S DIARY.
No I.
[The following striking narrative is translated from the MS. Memoirs of the late Rev. Dr Gottlieb Michael Gosschen, a Catholic clergyman of great eminence in the city of Ratisbonne. It was the custom of this divine to preserve, in the shape of a diary, a regular account of all the interesting particulars which fell in his way, during the exercise of his sacred profession. Two thick small quartos, filled with these strange materials, have been put into our hands by the kindness of Count Frederick von Lindénbäumenberg, to whom the worthy father bequeathed them. Many a dark story, well fitted to be the groundwork of a romance,—many a tale of guilty love and repentance,—many a fearful monument of remorse and horror, might we extract from this record of dungeons and confessionals. We shall from time to time do so, but sparingly, and what is still more necessary, with selection.]Editor.
Never had a murder so agitated the inhabitants of this city as that of Maria von Richterstein. No heart could be pacified till the murderer was condemned. But no sooner was his doom sealed, and the day fixed for his execution, than a great change took place in the public feeling. The evidence, though conclusive, had been wholly circumstantial. And people who, before his condemnation, were as assured of the murderer’s guilt as if they had seen him with red hands, began now to conjure up the most contradictory and absurd reasons for believing in the possibility of his innocence. His own dark and sullen silence seemed to some, an indignant expression of that innocence which he was too proud to avow,—some thought they saw in his imperturbable demeanour, a resolution to court death, because his life was miserable, and his reputation blasted,—and others, the most numerous, without reason or reflection, felt such sympathy with the criminal, as almost amounted to a negation of his crime. The man under sentence of death was, in all the beauty of youth, distinguished above his fellows for graceful accomplishments, and the last of a noble family. He had lain a month in his dungeon, heavily laden with irons. Only the first week he had been visited by several religionists, but he then fiercely ordered the jailor to admit no more “men of God,”—and till the eve of his execution, he had lain in dark solitude, abandoned to his own soul.
It was near midnight when a message was sent to me by a magistrate, that the murderer was desirous of seeing me. I had been with many men in his unhappy situation, and in no case had I failed to calm the agonies of grief, and the fears of the world to come. But I had known this youth—had sat with him at his father’s table—I knew also that there was in him a strange and fearful mixture of good and evil—I was aware that there were circumstances in the history of his progenitors not generally known—nay, in his own life—that made him an object of awful commiseration—and I went to his cell with an agitating sense of the enormity of his guilt, but a still more agitating one of the depth of his misery, and the wildness of his misfortunes.
I entered his cell, and the phantom struck me with terror. He stood erect in his irons, like a corpse that had risen from the grave. His face, once so beautiful, was pale as a shroud, and drawn into ghastly wrinkles. His black-matted hair hung over it with a terrible expression of wrathful and savage misery. And his large eyes, which were once black, glared with a light in which all colour was lost, and
