The " of Murder."
Thomas de Quincy, as is well known, has written a treatise on "Murder considered as one of the fine arts," and a sequel to the same giving an account of three remarkable murders in London in 1812. It is to be regretted that the opium cater is not still living, for be might find in the present war, and especially in the last raid upon Richmond, illustrations of his subject which no pen can do justice to like his own.Dean Swift proposed, observes Mr. De Quincy, to turn to account the supernumerary infants of Great Britain, which in those days were provided for in foundling hospitals, by cooking and eating them. This extravagance of the Dean was evidently unknown to the projectors of the Dahlgren raid, or the programme of the "Oakum and Turpentine Brigade" would never have omitted so philanthropic and practical a suggestion. The facetious monstrosity of the Dean might have been carried out in sober earnest, and the hungry troopers of Kilpatrick have regaled themselves on choice bits of rebel babies, roasted to a turn on the spits of bayonets. If you cook your game, why not eat it? and even Yankee mendacity has not the effrontery to deny that they meant to "cook" the most defenceless part of the human species. Not one line or word of Dahlgren's minute orders for burning up the people, big and little, of this city, has been denied by the Yankee press. They only undertake to say that the order 40 kill the President and his Cabinet was interpolated by the rebels, as if that were a greater crime than burning and murdering a population of one hundred thousand souls, including women and children.
Some allowance must be made, however, for the refined and cultivated tastes of the Yankee nation. The critical valuation of murders is nowhere so universal as in the Yankee nation. To this the police columns of their city journals, even in times of peace, bear unquestionable evidence. A Yankee's coffee at breakfast is as insipid without the accompaniment of a first rate murder in his morning paper as a cup of milkiness and sugarless Confederate rye. The " features" of the several murders are worked up by accomplished caterers for the Northern paints in the highest style of art. A case like that of Helen Jewett ministers refreshment to a cultivated Yankee imagination for at least a quarter of a century, and the gray headed New Yorkers of that era look down with as much contempt upon your Colt and Burdell butcheries as the contemporaries of Raphael and Canova might have felt, if they could have beheld them, for the most bungling pictures and statues of the present day.
It is pleasant, therefore, to conjecture that the Yankees, in purposing to destroy the whole population of Richmond, to impale the men upon bayonets, and to burn up the women and children, were not so much actuated by an animal thirst for blood, as by an elegant taste for grand scenic spectacles. How magnificently the account of Richmond in flames would have loomed up in the New York Herald--the turpentine blazing, the gunpowder roaring, the river red with the conflagration, the gutters red with blood, the shrieks of women rushing from threatened shame to a more merciful death; the death groans of the fallen mingles with the curses of these murderers, and the thunders of Dahlgren's torpedoes succeeded by the piteous walls of children from the burning dwellings. Ah, what a beautiful feast for the cultivated Yankee imagination! What injustice to their critical taste to deny that they proposed to give the finishing touch to this picture, and impart complete dramatic harmony to its effect by hanging the President and his Cabinet upon the lamp posts of the capitol!
It is remarkable that the portrait drawn by Dr. Quincy of the artistic London murderer of 1812 might be adopted with little modifications for a sketch of Dahlgren. The latter is said to have been a light-haired, cadaverous, smooth faced gentleman, very polite in his manners, and treating his prisoners (whom he carried with him in the front, where they would be likely to fall at the first fire of the Confederates,) with great suavity and pleasantness. The London artist is described as a low, slender man; wiry, but muscular, with hair something between an orange and a lemon color, and his face of a bloodless, ghastly pallor. It was only the oily and snaky insinuation of his demeanor that counteracted the influence of his ghastly face. He generally carried the tools of his trade buttoned up under his loose roomy coat, and so prompt and unfailing was his politeness that if the deadly mallet under his garment chanced to brush roughly against a passer-by, a graceful apology was ready to avert the idea of intentional rudeness.
He once playfully said to a young woman whom it is supposed he intended to kill,-- "What would you think if you should wake up in the night and find me at your bedside with a razor at your throat?" "Oh, I should be dreadfully alarmed at first, " was the answer, "but when I saw it was you I should cease to fear." After a succession of the most mysterious and frightful murders this miniature Dahlgren was ambushed by a cowardly London mob, who, howling like demons, followed him to jail, wherein he disappointed their vengeance by putting himself to death. We have not heard whether the villainous assassins were denounced by the public journals for their hideous persecution of a great artist; but, if not, the contrast in the tone of the Northern press, with reference to the treatment of a far greater master in the fine art of murder, affords Jone mor of many illustrations of the superior civilization and refinement of the United States.
