It is no doubt beneficial for man to think well of the good, but it is not advantageous for him to think lightly of the evil potentialities of his nature. We cannot deny that these men and women were sane; and we have higher authority than a wish-born logic or a self-gratifying rhetoric to satisfy us that "the heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked." The authority is from heaven, and there is no want of verifying examples upon earth; nay, if we abate the "putrid coruscations," or what have been called "the blue lights of necromancy" that play round these sordid murders, and which are at least nourished by the fancy, we may find every day cases scarcely less cruel and scarcely less sordid,--if we might not even say that it requires some analysis to find the difference in mere turpitude between a man who murders for the money that is about the body and one who slays for that which the body will bring. Then the repetition adds nothing to the atrocity of the individual act, while the premeditation is as signal in the slouching highwayman as in him who wiles the victim to the fatal den. In short, we may make what parade we please of the gradations of atrocity and the shades of our feelings, but we must always come back to the beginning, that there are no degrees of wickedness in those who have renounced God. Not only, however, were these individuals sane; one among them, and the leader, was intelligent, had wit and humour, could feel the superficial sentiment of a pathetic lyric, and, above all, possessed ingenuity to the extent of inventing a new crime which has gone, with his name, over the world. The women, too, were intelligent and apt; nor has it been said that Mrs Hare did not feel the yearnings of a mother, or that M'Dougal was false to the affection, however low, which bound her to the tyrant who enslaved her. Even Hare was not a fool--a character inconsistent with a will-power which could govern a woman of his wife's acknowledged adroitness, and lead, if not rule, a man such as Burke, so that we may say that, so far as regards mere intelligence, the quaternity were a fair enough specimen of the people of their class, in which certain parts of our city abound; while Burke may be safely pronounced as being considerably above the average of uncultivated minds, left as a waste for the culture of the devil. But not only in this aspect were they worthy of study--they were perfect in their moral organisation as embodiments of evil, with no scruples, no misgivings, no backcomings of penitence, no fear of the future, and no remorse for the past. They were not only "clear grits"--they were "crystals." They were, out of millions, creatures suited to the work they did--the work was suited to them, and they did it with all that concentration of purpose and uniformity of action which proclaim the being under alienation from the Almighty.