[76] The committee made no report. Lord Delamere undertook to draw it up, but before he did so, parliament was prorogued. Bishop Burnet, who has given the particulars of the case with great minuteness, says, he had no doubt that the Earl of Essex committed suicide. He was subject to fits of deep melancholy, and maintained the lawfulness of suicide. This is also Hume’s opinion. [77] This is confirmed by the fact that within the jurisdiction of the metropolitan police, the two districts in which the greatest number of suicides were committed or attempted, in 1836 or 1837, were those of the Regent’s Park and Stepney, through both of which the Regent’s Canal runs. This circumstance tends to shew that drowning is the mode of suicide most frequently resorted to in London, and that a canal offers greater facilities for that purpose than the river. [78] The disposition to suicide may be manifested very early in life. M. Falret knew a boy, twelve years old, who hanged himself because he was only twelfth in his class. A similar case occurred at the Westminster school about seventeen years ago. Harriet Cooper, of Huden Hill, Rowly-Regis, aged ten years and two months, upon being reproved for a trifling fault, went upstairs, after exhibiting symptoms of grief by sighing and sobbing, and hung herself with a pair of cotton braces from the rail of a tent bed. A girl named Green, eleven years old, drowned herself in the New River, from the fear of correction for a trifling fault. Dr. Schlegel states, on the authority of Casper, that in Berlin, between the years 1812 and 1821, no less than thirty-one children, of twelve years of age and under, committed suicide, either because they were tired of existence or had suffered some trifling chastisement. [79] “Oh, supreme God, who inhabitest the highest heavens, heal my afflictions; as with the wretched in hell, the joyful in heaven, shew mercy to the guilty.” [80] Dr. Moore’s Travels through France, vol. i. let. 32. [81] Hufeland’s Journal. [82] Hist. de l’Acad. Roy., 1769. [83] Paris and the Parisians, by Mrs. Trollope. [84] Voltaire observes, that if Creech had been translating Ovid, he would not have committed suicide. [85] We refer our readers, for a minute and deeply interesting account of this unfortunate woman’s career, to a work from which we have gleaned the above facts; the particulars of her life will be perused with great interest.—Vide “Memoirs of Mirabeau, by himself,” vol. iii. chap. xi. [86] Vide Frontispiece. [87] A singular case of this kind was brought under the notice of the Westminster Medical Society by Dr. Stone, as an argument in favour of the possibility of a person committing suicide when in possession of a sane mind. T. C. Savill, Printer, 107, St. Martin’s Lane, Charing Cross.