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THE PREMATURE BURIAL
THERE are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but
which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction.
These the mere romanticist must eschew, if he do not wish to offend or
to disgust. They are with propriety handled only when the severity and
majesty of Truth sanctify and sustain them. We thrill, for example, with
the most intense of "pleasurable pain" over the accounts of the Passage
of the Beresina, of the Earthquake at Lisbon, of the Plague at London,
of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, or of the stifling of the hundred
and twenty-three prisoners in the Black Hole at Calcutta. But in these
accounts it is the fact----it is the reality----it is the history which
excites. As inventions, we should regard them with simple abhorrence.
I have mentioned some few of the more prominent and august calamities
on record; but in these it is the extent, not less than the character
of the calamity, which so vividly impresses the fancy. I need not remind
the reader that, from the long and weird catalogue of human miseries,
I might have selected many individual instances more replete with
essential suffering than any of these vast generalities of disaster.
The true wretchedness, indeed--the ultimate woe----is particular, not
diffuse. That the ghastly extremes of agony are endured by man the unit,
and never by man the mass----for this let us thank a merciful God!
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