might have stood in need of such severe and terrible laws, so Draconic in their naterc; but the refined inhabitants of polished Greece and Rome, needed not such barbarous enactments. The advancing spirit of civilization had swept along in its effacing train, all the necessity for such brutal ferocity, by destroying the ferocious character of the people; as it opened to them more refined sources of enjoyment, in the erection of works of art, and in mental cultivation. "The muses too, had purified and rendered delicate their tastes, 80 that outward barbarity seemed no longer attractive; although their ancestors had indulged in such scenes with great gusto. Our Druidical, Saxon and Norman ancestry, might have needed as cruel laws as those we now live under. At least such laws would have been more appropriate to their semi-barbarous condition, than they are to our improved state; but surely, we of the nineteenth century, having outlived the errors of the past, and having reached a point, from which we can cast our eyes far back into the distant past, and behold with utter astonishment, the absurd practices of our cruel and ignorant ancestors; are not obliged, out of regard for the memory of those not so far removed from us, in point of time, as those whose memories we do not hesitate to execrate, to retain as objectionable laws as ever disgraced the statute book of England, in the days of the bloody Jeffreys, or when the unalterable "Star chamber" decisions, were the law of the land. For a country to make its boast of civilization, and to call itself a refined nation, while it tenaciously grasps the worst errors of its ancestors, and plunges into a fit of madness, at the least allusion to an alteration of its cannibal laws, seems somewhat astonishing.
