But let criticism leave
church-rates and the franchise alone, and in the most candid spirit,
without a single lurking thought of practical innovation, confront with
our dithyramb this paragraph on which I stumbled in a newspaper
immediately after reading Mr. Roebuck:--
"A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl
named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young
illegitimate child. The child was soon afterwards found dead on Mapperly
Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody."
Nothing but that; but, in juxtaposition with the absolute eulogies of
Sir Charles Adderley and Mr. Roebuck, how eloquent, how suggestive are
those few lines! "Our old Anglo-Saxon breed, the best in the whole
world!"--how much that is harsh and ill-favored there is in this best!
_Wragg!_ If we are to talk of ideal perfection, of "the best in the
whole world," has any one reflected what a touch of grossness in our
race, what an original short-coming in the more delicate spiritual
perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous
names,--Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! In Ionia and Attica they were
luckier in this respect than "the best race in the world"; by the
Ilissus there was no Wragg, poor thing! And "our unrivalled happiness";
--what an element of grimness, bareness, and hideousness mixes with it
and blurs it; the workhouse, the dismal Mapperly Hills,--how dismal
those who have seen them will remember;--the gloom, the smoke, the cold,
the strangled illegitimate child! "I ask you whether, the world over or
in past history, there is anything like it?" Perhaps not, one is
inclined to answer; but at any rate, in that case, the world is very
much to be pitied.
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