The eloquence of Cockburn saved the woman from the gallows; but Burke was duly hanged at the head of Liberton Wynd on the morning of January 28, 1829, in the presence of a vast concourse of people. The writer's grand-uncle, then a young man of eight and twenty, was one of the thousands of eye-witnesses.

The body of the murderer, after being exposed to the public gaze in the anatomy classroom at the University, and a lecture on the brain by the third Monro having been given, was according to the sentence the last of its kind-duly dissected and retained as an osteological preparation in the Anatomical Museum. It is there to this day.

These things require to be remembered before the allusions by Sir Walter Scott in his 'Journal' and letters can properly be understood.

When Burke was on the scaffold the crowd cried out: 'Hang Knox too!' The man thus called for was Dr. Robert Knox, the lecturer on anatomy at the extra-mural School at Surgeons' Hall, a teacher as brilliant and efficient as Professor Monro was dull and inept. Knox's vivid teaching filled his classroom two or three times a day; and all Scotland could not provide enough 'subjects for his dissecting-rooms. His porter, a His porter, a man Paterson, was unquestionably aware that murder was being committed; but neither he, Knox, nor Knox's assistants asked any awkward questions when corpse after corpse was delivered in a sack or a tea-chest at the back entrance of Surgeons' Hall, sometimes in broad daylight!

The first reference by Scott in his Journal' is under date January 14, (1829, Edinburgh), and is as follows:

'January 14 (Edinburgh) . . . then called on Mr. Robison and instructed him to call a meeting of the council of the Royal Society, as Mr. Knox proposes to read an essay on some dissections. A bold proposal, truly, from one who has had so lately the boldness of trading so deep in human flesh! I will oppose his reading in the present circumstances if I should stand alone, but I hope he will be wrought upon to withdraw his essay or postpone it at least. It is very bad taste to push himself forward just now.'

Good taste was certainly not one of Knox's characteristics. Although a splendid lecturer, he was vain and quarrelsome. He probably regarded his proposed paper at the Royal Society as a matter concerning anatomical science alone; but the specimens on which he wished to give his communication were probably

parts' from some of Burke's victims, and at this time Burke was actually still in jail under sentence of death.

Sir Walter was President of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, but the gentleman in him would not allow him to agree to Knox's offer.

In his Journal' for next day, January 15, Scott refers at much greater length to the subject:

'I went to the Council of the Royal Society which was convened at my request to consider whether we ought to have a paper on anatomical subjects read by Mr. Knox whose name has of late been deeply implicated in a criminal prosecution against certain wretches who had murdered many persons and sold their bodies to professors of the anatomical science. Some thought that our declining to receive the paper would be a declaration unfavourable to Dr. Knox. I think hearing it before Mr. Knox has made any defence (as he is stated to have in view) would be an intimation of our preference of the cause of science to those of morality and common humanity. Mr. Knox's friends undertook to deal with him about suffering the paper to be omitted for the present while adhuc coram judice lis est.'

The footnote to this entry reads:

'Sir Walter in common with the majority of his contemporaries evidently believed that Dr. Robert Knox was partly responsible for the West Port atrocities; but it is only just to the memory of the talented Anatomist to say that an independent and influential committee, after a careful examination, reported on March 13, 1829, that there was no evidence showing that he or his assistants knew that murder had been committed, but the committee thought that more care should have been exercised at the Anatomical classroom.'

Lord Cockburn, who was one of the counsel at the trial of Burke, in writing of these events remarks:

'All our anatomists incurred a most unjust and very alarming though not an unnatural odium; Dr. Knox in particular, against whom not only the anger of the populace but the condemnation of more intelligent persons was specially directed. But tried in reference to the invariable and the necessary practice of the profession, our anatomists were spotlessly correct and Knox the most correct of them all.'

At this date Dr. Knox was the most popular teacher in the Medical School at Edinburgh, and as his classroom could not contain more than a third of his students, he had to deliver his lectures

twice or thrice daily. The odium attached to his name might have been removed in time had his personal character stood as high as his professional ability, but though he remained in Edinburgh until 1841, he never recovered his position there, and for the last twenty years of his life this once brilliant teacher subsisted as best he could in London by his pen and as an itinerant lecturer. He died in 1862. Knox was born in 1791.

Sir Walter returns to the subject in his diary for the next day, January 16:

'I again met the Royal Society Council. Dr. Knox consents to withdraw his paper or rather suffers the reading to be postponed. There is some great error in the law on this subject. If it was left to itself, many bodies would be imported from France or Ireland, and doubtless many would be found in our hospitals for the service of the anatomical science. But the total and severe exclusion of foreign supplies of this kind raises the price of the "subjects," as they are called technically, to such a height that wretches are found willing to break into "the bloody house of life" 1 merely to supply the anatomists' table. The law which, as a deeper sentence on the guilt of murder, declares that the body of the convicted criminal should be given up to anatomy, is certainly not without effect, for criminals have been known to shrink from the part of the sentence which seems to affect them more than the doom of death itself with all its terrors here and hereafter. On the other hand while this idea of infamy attending the exposition of the person is thus recognised by the law, it is impossible to adopt regulations which would effectually prevent such horrid crimes as the murder of vagrant wretches who can be snatched from society without their being missed, as in the case of the late conspiracy.

"For instance, if it was now to be enacted, as seems reasonable, that persons dying in hospitals and alms-houses, who die without their friends claiming their remains, should be given up to the men of science, this would be subjecting poverty to the penalty of these atrocious criminals whom law distinguishes by the heaviest posthumous disgrace which it can inflict. Even cultivated minds revolt from the exposure on an anatomical table when the case is supposed to be that of one who is dear to them. I should, I am conscious, be willing that I myself should be dissected in public if doing so could produce any advantage to society, but when I think on relations and friends being rent from the grave, the case is very different, and I would fight knee-deep to prevent or punish such

1 King John, Act iv. Scene 2.

an exposure. So inconsistent we are all upon matters of this

nature.'

The next date which concerns us is January 23, on which day the entry reads: 'Still severe frost, annoying to sore fingers. . . . I sat at home, and wrote letters to Wilkie, Landseer, Mrs. Hughes, Charles, etc.'

What concerns us here is the name of Mrs. Hughes. This lady, a very old friend of Sir Walter, was the wife of the Rev. Dr. Hughes, one of the canons-residentiary of St. Paul's. She was the mother of Thomas Hughes, the author of 'Tom Brown's Schooldays.' In 1834 the Hughes's visited Scott both at Castle Street and at Abbotsford.

The letter occurs in a volume published by Thomas Nelson and Sons, but bears no date; its title is 'Letters and Recollections of Sir Walter Scott, by Mrs. Hughes of Uppingham, edited by Horace G. Hutchinson.'1 The editorial explanation and the letter itself are as follow:

'In the letter that follows and again later Sir Walter refers a good deal, and in a way that shows how much the horror and human interest of their inhuman crime attracted him, to the murders by Burke and Hare. It was not merely as a student of human nature that he took a peculiar interest in them, but rather that the whole of Great Britain, and more especially Edinburgh, was at that time full of the case with a sort of astoundment that such unsuspected possibilities could exist in our human nature even in its most brutal degradation.'

'In the meantime we have the horrors of the West Port to amuse us, and that we may appear wiser than our neighbours, we drive in our carriages, filled with well-dressed females, to see the wretched cellars in which these atrocities were perpetrated; and anyone that can get a pair of shoes cobbled by Burke would preserve them with as much devotion as a Catholic would do the sandals of a saint which had pressed the holy soil of Palestine. I suspect Justice has done her best or worst to avenge these enormities, and one's natural feelings revolt to think that so many of the perpetrators must escape punishment. But you must recollect that it is a thousand times better that the greatest villain should escape, than that public faith should be broken or the law wrested from its even tenour for the purpose of punishing them, and the Lord Advocate could not have convicted Burke without the evidence of Hare and 1 Originally published by Smith, Elder & Co. in 1904.-ED.

his wife, and even succeeded with difficu To break faith with the wretch would measure a great barrier which the pul against crime from the want of reliance of Hare, therefore, I fear must be left to t unless the rabble were to make another not go to the scene, although the newsp the visitors.

The next reference to these atrocit 'Journal' of Sir Walter Scott, under dat

'Burke the murderer hanged this m was immense, demanded Knox and Har more victims, received with shouts the s his way to the gallows out of five or six than he.

'But the story begins to be stale, alth ballad upon it would be popular, how brut the progress of human passions. We ejacu Heaven our hand, like the rustic Phidyle,changes, and we dance a jig to the tune w

On the day following this, January 29,

in the Journal' to a letter to Mrs. Hughe

'January 29th. . . . After dinner to c my conscience I wrote letters to Mr. Bel forth.'

The editor of the letters introduces t Sir Walter thus:

'The next letter to Mrs. Hughes is wit but the reference to Burke's execution fixes January, 1829. It is pathetic enough to thi immortal novels fumbling down the inspired chilblainey fingers. . . .'

'Your wishes have been nearly accomplis been well nigh hunted to death; she was reco with a blind, sickly child in her arms and ins mob with snow-balls and stones and even per

1 The North Bridge at Edinburgh, which now span It connects the Old Town with the New.