“During a residence in Germany, some years ago, chance threw me in the way of hearing much of this engine, without being able clearly to understand what it was, excepting that it exercised the functions of executioner in the form of the Virgin Mary, and exterminated its victims by hugging them in arms furnished with iron blades. Thus they were soon deprived of life. It was said to have existed in many towns and castles, and even _convents_. Some represented it to be an image of the Virgin Mary, which the culprit was told to kiss, and which, on being touched by him, was set in motion by inward machinery, which caused the figure to fall down and crush him. Others said, that its arms expanded and clasped him to a breast, out of which poniards protruded. Others, again, represented it merely as an emblem of _Justice_, placed above a trap-door, on which the culprit trod, as he advanced to pay her his homage, and which, being left unbolted, sank underneath his weight, and precipitated him into an abyss. “The difficulty of obtaining evidence respecting it, and the contradictory and, consequently, unsatisfactory nature of the little that I did for some time obtain, made me begin to treat the stories which I had heard as the result of popular error. Added to this, I found almost all the members of the modern school of philosophy prepared to treat the thing as an old woman’s tale; and one of them told me that the whole affair was a mere monkish lie. “Discouraged as I was by the result of my inquiries, I could not altogether hold the thing as utterly without basis. And being loath to treat as mere idle rumour that which had been heard of by every German, and was believed by the great majority of the people, I was tempted to take a middle course between belief and unbelief, and to conclude that the _Virgin_ must have been the _plank_, or German _guillotine_. The conclusion which I arrived at was, however, disturbed by a passage which I accidentally met in a book, entitled, ‘Materialen zur Nürnber-gerisehen Geschichte herausge geben von D. T. C. Siebenkees, Nürnberg, 1792.’ “The passage in question is represented to have been extracted from a Chronicle (which the author has not indicated), and may be thus rendered in English:--‘In the year of our Lord 1533, the Iron Virgin was constructed, for the punishment of evil-doers, within the walls of the Frogs-Tower, opposite the place called _Die Sieben Zeiler_--that is to say, the Seven Ropes; so, at least, it was publicly given out, to justify the thing. Therein was an _iron_ statue, _seven feet high_, which stretched abroad both its arms in the face of the criminal, and death by this machine was said to send the poor sinner to the fishes. For, so soon as the executioner moved the step on which it stood, it hewed, with broad hand-swords, the criminal into little pieces, which were swallowed by fishes in hidden waters. Such secret tribunals existed formerly in many countries.”