At present about 60,000 persons are annually committed, in the British islands, for serious offences[14] worthy of deliberate trial, and above double that number for summary or police offences. A hundred and eighty thousand persons annually fall under the lash of the criminal law, and are committed for longer or shorter periods to places of confinement for punishment. The number is prodigious--it is frightful. Yet it is in all only about 1 in 120 of the population; and from the great number who are repeatedly committed during the same year, the individuals punished are not 1 in 200. Such as they are, it may safely be affirmed that four-fifths of this 180,000 comes out of two or three millions of the community. We are quite sure that 150,000 come from 3,000,000 of the lowest and most squalid of the empire, and not 30,000 from the remaining 24,000,000 who live in comparative comfort. This consideration is fitted both to encourage hope and awaken shame--hope, as showing from how small a class in society the greater part of the crime comes, and to how limited a sphere the remedies require to be applied; shame, as demonstrating how disgraceful has been the apathy, selfishness, and supineness in the other more numerous and better classes, around whom the evil has arisen, but who seldom interfere, except to RESIST all measures calculated for its removal. It is to this subject--the ease with which the extraordinary and unprecedented increase of crime in the empire might be arrested by proper means and the total inefficiency of all the remedies hitherto attempted, from the want of practical knowledge on the part of those at the head of affairs, and an entirely false view of human nature in society generally, that we shall direct the attention of our readers in a future Number. [Footnote 14: Viz., in round numbers-- England, 30,000 Ireland, 26,000 Scotland, 4,000 60,000] THE HEART OF THE BRUCE. A BALLAD. It was upon an April morn While yet the frost lay hoar, We heard Lord James's bugle-horn Sound by the rocky shore. Then down we went, a hundred knights, All in our dark array, And flung our armour in the ships That rode within the bay. We spoke not as the shore grew less, But gazed in silence back, Where the long billows swept away The foam behind our track. And aye the purple hues decay'd Upon the fading hill, And but one heart in all that ship Was tranquil, cold, and still. The good Earl Douglas walk'd the deck, And oh, his brow was wan! Unlike the flush it used to wear When in the battle van.-- "Come hither, come hither, my trusty knight, Sir Simon of the Lee; There is a freit lies near my soul I fain would tell to thee. "Thou knowest the words King Robert spoke Upon his dying day, How he bade me take his noble heart And carry it far away: