These strange evidences of refinement only brought out the squalor, smallness, and unfitness for any part of a judicial inquiry of the inner apartments, into more glaring relief. Surely so important a function as that of a coroner and his jury should not be conducted amidst such a scene! Besides other obvious objections, the danger of keeping corpses in confined apartments, and in close neighbourhoods, was here strongly exemplified. The smell was so ‘close’ and insanitary, that the first man who entered the den where the body lay, caused the window to be opened. Two children, the offspring of the victim and the accused, lived in these apartments; and above stairs the house was crowded with lodgers, to all of whom any sort of infection would have proved the more disastrous from living next door, as it were, to Death. It is terrible to reflect that every decease happening among the myriads of the population a little lower in circumstances than this baker, deals around it its proportion of destruction to the living, from the same causes. True, that had it been impossible to retain the body where death occurred—as chances when several persons live in the same room—it would have been removed. But where.—The coroner and jury would have had to view it in the tap-room of a public-house. There is another objection—all-powerful in the eyes of a lawyer. He recognises as a first necessity that the jurors should have no opportunity of communicating with witnesses, except when before the Court. But here the melancholy honours of the baker’s shop and parlour were performed by the two persons from whose evidence the cause of death was to be chiefly elicited;—the journeyman and a female relative of the deceased, who were in the house when the last blows were dealt, and when the woman died. They received the fifteen jurymen who were presently to judge of their testimony; and there was nothing but the strong sense of propriety which actuated these gentlemen on the present occasion, to prevent the witnesses from telling their own story privately in their own way, to any one or half dozen of the inquest, and thus to give a premature bent to opinions, the materials for forming which, ought to be strictly reserved for the public Court. Many examples can be supplied in illustration of this evil. We select one:—Some years ago, an old woman in the most wretched part of Westminster, was found dead in her bed—strangled. When the Coroner and jury went to view the body, they were ushered by a young female—a relative—who lived with the deceased. She explained there and then all about the death. When the Court re-assembled, she was—chiefly, it was understood, in consequence of what had previously passed—examined as first and principal witness, and upon her evidence, the verdict arrived at, was ‘Temporary insanity.’ The case, however, subsequently