and desperate young rakes, who threw the small remains of their bankrupt fortunes into one common stock, and thence assumed the name of the Last Guinea Club. A short life and a merry one was their favourite maxim; and they determined, when their finances should be quite exhausted, to die has they had lived, like gentlemen. Some of their members had the luck to get a reprieve by a good run at cards, and others by snapping up a rich heiress or a dowager; while the rest, who were not cut off in the natural way by duels or the gallows, very resolutely made their quietus with laudanum or the pistol. The last that remained of this society had very calmly prepared for his own execution; he had cocked his pistol, deliberately placed the muzzle of it to his temple, and was just going to pull the trigger, when he bethought himself that he could employ it to better purpose upon Hounslow Heath. This brave man, however, had but a very short respite, and was obliged to suffer the ignominy of going out of the world in the vulgar way by an halter.

The enemies of play will perhaps consider those gentlemen, who boldly stake their whole fortunes at the gaming-table, in the same view with these desperadoes; and they may even go so far as so regard the polite and honourable assembly at White's as a kind of Last Guinea Club. Nothing, they will say, is so fluctuating as the property of a gamester, who (when luck runs against him) throws away whole acres at every cast of the dice, and whose houses are as unsure a possession, as if they were built with cards. Many, indeed, have been reduced to their last guinea at this genteel gaming-house; but the most inveterate enemies to White's must allow, that it is but now and then, that a gamester of quality, who looks upon it as a tossup whether there is another world, takes his chance,

and dispatches himself, when the odds are against him in this.

But however free the gentlemen of White's may be from any imputation of this kind, it must be confessed, that suicide begins to prevail so generally, that it is the most gallant exploit, by which our modern heroes choose to signalize themselves; and in this, indeed, they behave with uncommon prowess. From the days of Plato down to these, a suicide has always been compared to a soldier on guard deserting his post; but I should rather consider a set of these desperate men, who rush on certain death, as a body of troops sent out on the Forlorn Hope. They meet every face of death, however horrible, with the utmost resolution: some blow their brains out with a pistol; some expire like Socrates, by poison; some fall, like Cato, on the point of their own swords; and others, who have lived like Nero, affect to die like Seneca, and bleed to death. The most exalted geniuses I ever remember to have heard of, were a party of reduced gamesters, who bravely resolved to pledge each other in a bowl of laudanum, I was also lately informed of a gentleman, who went among his usual companions at the gaming table the day before he made away with himself, and coolly questioned them which they thought the easiest and genteelest method of going out of the world; for there is as much difference between a mean person and a man of quality in their manner of destroying themselves, as in their manner of living. The poor sneaking wretch, starving in a garret, tucks himself up in his list garters; a second, crost in love, drowns him self like a blind puppy, in Rosamond's Pond; and a third cuts his throat with his own razor. But the man of fashion almost always dies by a pistol; and even the cobler of any spirit goes off by a dose or two extraor¬ dinary of gin.

But this false notion of courage, however noble

it may appear to the desperate and abandoned, in reality amounts to no more than the resolution of the highwayman, who shoots himself with his own pistol, when he finds it impossible to avoid being taken. All practicable means, therefore, should be devised to extirpate such absurd bravery, and to make it appear, every way horrible, odious, contemptible, and ridiculous. From reading the public prints a foreignermight be naturally led to imagine, that we are the most lunatic people in the whole world. Almost every day informs us, that the coroner's inquest has set on the body of some miserable suicide, and brought in their verdict lunacy; but it is very well known, that the inquiry has not been made into the state of mind of the deceased, but into his fortune and family. The law has indeed provided, that the deliberate self-murderer should be treated like a brute, and denied the rites of burial: but among hundreds of lunatics by purchase, I never knew this sentence executed but on one poor cabler, who hanged himself in his own stall. A pennyless poor dog, who has not left enough to defray the funeral charges, may perhaps be excluded the churchyard; but self-murder by a pistol genteelly mounted, or the Paris-hilted sword, qualifies the polite owner for a sudden death, and entitles him to a pompous burial, and a monument setting forth his virtues in Westminster Abbey. Every man in his sober senses must wish, that the most severe laws that could possibly be contrived were enacted against suicides. This shocking bravado never did (and I am confident never will!) prevail among the more delicate and tender sex in our own nation: though history informs us, that the Roman ladies were once so infatuated as to throw off the softness of their nature, and commit violence on themselves, till the madness was curbed by exposing their naked bodies in the public streets. This, I think, would afford an hint for fixing the like marks

of ignominy on our male-suicides; and I would have every lower wretch of this sort dragged at the cart's tail, and afterwards hung in chains at his own door, or have his quarters put up in terrorem in the most public places, as a rebel to his Maker. But that the suicide of quality might be treated with more respect, he should be indulged in having his wounded corpse and shattered brains lie (as it were) in state for some days; of which dreadful spectacle we may conceive the horror from the following picture drawn by Dryden :

The slayer of himself too saw I there:

The gore congeal'd was clotted in his hair :

With eyes half clos'd, and mouth wide ope he lay,
And grim as when he breath'd his sullen soul away.
DRYDEN'S FABLES.

The common murderer has his skeleton preserved at Surgeon's-Hall in order to deter others from being guilty of the same crime; and I think it would not be improper to have a charnel-house set apart to receive the bones of these more unnatural self-murderers, in which monuments should be erected, giving an account of their deaths, and adorned with the glorious ensigns of their rashness, the rope, the knife, the sword, or the pistol.

The cause of these frequent self-murders among us has been generally imputed to the peculiar temperature of our climate. Thus a dull day is looked upon as a natural order of execution, and Englishmen must necessarily shoot, hang, and drown themselves in November. That our spirits are in some measure influenced by the air cannot be denied; but we are not such mere barometers, as to be driven to despair and death by the small degree of gloom, that our winter brings with it. If we have not so much sunshine as some countries in the world, we have infinitely more than many others; and I do not hear that men dispatch

themselves by dozens in Russia or Sweden, or that they are unable to keep up their spirits even in the total darkness of Greenland. Our climate exempts us from many diseases, to which other more southern nations are naturally subject; and I can never be persuaded, that being born near the north-pole is a physical cause for self-murder.

Despair, indeed, is the natural cause of these shocking actions; but this is commonly despair brought on by wilful extravagance and debauchery. These first involve men into difficulties, and then death at once delivers them of their lives and their cares. For my part, when I see a young profligate wantonly squander ing his fortune in bagnios or at the gaming-table, I cannot help looking on him as hastening his own death, and in a manner digging his own grave. As he is at last induced to kill himself by motives arising from his vices, I consider him as dying of some disease, which those vices naturally produce. If his extravagance has been chiefly in luxurious eating and drinking, I imagine him poisoned by his wines, or surfeited by a favourite dish; and if he has thrown away his estate in bawdy houses, I conclude him destroyed by rottenness and filthy disease.

Another principal cause of the frequency of suicide is the noble spirit of free-thinking, which has diffused itself among all ranks of people. The libertine of fashion has too refined a taste to trouble himself at all about a soul or an hereafter: but the vulgar infidel is at wonderful pains to get rid of his bible, and labours to persuade himself out of his religion. For this purpose he attends constantly at the disputant societies, where he hears a great deal about free-will, free ageney, and predestination, till at length he is convinced that man is at liberty to do as he pleases, lays his misfortunes to the charge of Providence, and comforts himself that he was inevitably destined to be tied up