Another strange office of the headsman, at least in some parts of Germany, was to collect the periodical fine or impost levied from houses of an infamous class. Some striking particulars of his various opprobrious functions in the Middle Ages, which the peculiar genius of the German people and their literature has environed with a ghastly mystery that at times borders on the supernatural, is to be found in a curious work, entitled _Das Malefiz Buch_, reviewed in Blackwood’s Magazine for February 1848. Footnote 8: On the 31st May M. Drouyn de Lhuys wrote to Count Walewski, the French Ambassador in London, in the following terms:—“Monsieur le Comte, as I have already several times mentioned, there is by the side of diplomatic negotiations another action to exercise, and it is the attitude assumed by the Cabinet of St Petersburg itself which has shown the necessity of it. When we knew that the army cantoned in the south of Russia was on a war footing, that it was provisioned as on the eve of a campaign—when the fleet at Sebastopol was ready to weigh anchor—when considerable purchases of wood were made for throwing bridges over the Pruth and the Danube—if all this did not indicate that hostilities were declared, it at least showed that they were approaching, and that their commencement only depended on a word. Who could guarantee us that, under the influence of a first movement, that word would not be pronounced at St Petersburg, and that, if it had been, that the city of Constantinople would be protected from a _coup de main_? It was a danger of this kind that we feared, and as, if it were to be realised, the game would be lost at the outset, prudence imposed on us the duty of doing everything to prevent it. In what could such a measure of foresight more resemble a provocation than did the armaments of Russia herself? Why should not France and England, for the object of maintaining the treaty of 1841, have the right of doing that which one of the Powers which signed that convention was doing with such very different designs? Such are the considerations which determined us to send our fleet to Salamis, and which we now recommend to draw closer to the Dardanelles, not to take the initiative in an aggression, not to encourage Turkey to refuse every arrangement, but to secure her against an immediate danger, and to reserve in case of need to diplomacy the resources which it would no longer have if it had to struggle against _faits accomplis_.” Footnote 9: It is but fair to say that the noble Lord seemed to feel the sarcasm conveyed in the term “beau,” as the word is translated “important” in the papers laid before Parliament. Footnote 10: _Evenings in my Tent; or, Wanderings in Balad Ejjareed. Illustrating the Moral, Social, and Political Conditions of various Arab Tribes of the African Sahara._ By the Rev. W. Davis, F.R.S.S.A. 2 vols. London: 1854.