following is a list of the killed :-Mary Ellen Sherwood, 16, domestic servant; Thomas Merchant, 18, baker; Eliza Lucas, 18; Patrick Donovan, 17; Alfred Ken, 18; Thomas Pearson, 21, shopman; Samuel Hill, 13; William Daves, 14; George Potter, 11; Henry Charles Vining; Ellen Jones, 15; Sarah Ann Belbey, 18; Catherine Brewer, 16; Joseph Smith, 15; Charles Pring, 17; Elizabeth Hall, 60; William Samuel Alder, 21; Charles Tallot, 14. With one exception, that of Ellen Jones, who resided at Weston-super-Mare, all the persons identified lived in Bristol. The Bristol Theatre had only been built three years; and it was supposed that special care had been taken in its construction to provide for safe ingress and egress under all circumstances. It had received great crowds without an accident on many former occasions, and although it is easy to be wise after the event, the ample width and length of the passage might fairly justify the assumption that it would meet all demands upon its space. The theatre was reopened on the 29th, but only to a thin audience. The shock of what occurred will pass slowly away from the minds of those who might easily have themselves been victims. There were many hair-breadth escapes. Several people were rescued from the crush by good Samaritans, who let down a rope from a roof that overhung the passage; but at last this rope was dragged away from its owners, thrown down, and trampled upon. So little sense of the great danger was there among the crowd that some persons whose actual companions were separated from them and killed succeeded in making good their own way into the theatre, and enjoyed the performance without any anxiety about the fate of those who were less fortunate. 30. TRIAL OF TROPMANN, THE PANTIN MURDERER.-The trial of Jean Baptiste Tropmann, known as the Pantin murderer, terminated in Paris in a verdict of guilty, and the prisoner was accordingly sentenced to death. The crimes of which Tropmann was convicted caused a thrill of horror throughout the whole civilized world; as well they might, for a more hardened and inhuman wretch has seldom, if ever, appeared at the bar of justice. The prisoner, who was not more than twenty, was indicted for the murder of no less than eight persons, as well as for crimes of lesser magnitude, such as forgery, &c. We give the following facts as they were proved at the trial: Rather more than three months before, all Paris was electrified by the rumoured discovery of six newly-buried and scarcely cold bodies in a clover-field in the commune of Pantin. An agricultural labourer, when going to his work, had noticed that the earth was spattered with blood and brains, had found a human head lying but a few inches below the surface, and had forthwith informed the police, by whom the six corpses were speedily disinterred. These consisted of a woman and five small children. The woman had been killed by a blow from behind, but her body bore no fewer than thirty wounds. Two of her children had been strangled, but all appeared to have been slashed, and battered, and mangled, as if with the fury and malice of a demon. On inquiry it was found that the family-whose name was Kinck-had only the day before arrived from Roubaix, that the wife had inquired for her husband at the Hotel du Chemin de Fer du Nord, and had then gone, no one knew whither. A person who had been staying at the hotel, and who had given the name of Jean Kinck, had disappeared about the same time, and about him, for some days, no information could be obtained, though the accession of such a group of dead bodies made the Morgue by far the most popular of Parisian attractions. Three days after the first discovery, a man who called himself Fisch was arrested at Havre as a suspected person. He had been staying at different hotels, making sinister utterances, and trying to obtain fraudulent embarkation papers, in order to start for the United States. His answers to the gendarme were confused and unsatisfactory. On his way to the Procureur Imperial he almost successfully attempted to commit suicide, and when searched a number of the missing Jean Kinck's papers were found upon him. Clearly, the "suspect" had had something to do with the Pantin murder, which was just then making so much stir, and the conversations of his gaolers soon made him aware that he was to be interrogated with respect to them. As soon as Tropmann (the soi-disant Fisch) heard this, he must have felt that his game was up. But with consummate craftiness, he endeavoured to put the best face on a very suspicious-looking situation. The authorities scarcely believed that any single man could have committed such wholesale homicide, and their prisoner forthwith turned their doubts to account. He had been present, he said, when Madame Kinck and her children met their deaths; nay, he had been in a measure the instrument of their murder. But at the worst he had been only an accessory. Jean Kinck, the head of the family, had doubted his wife's fidelity; had arranged with his son Gustave to leave France for America, and the two had taken their friend Tropmann into their confidence, with whose aid they had carried out the plan which they had contrived for murdering all the other members of the family. But this fiction was too flimsy to hang together after Gustave Kinck's body was found only a few yards from the place where his kinsfolk had been laid. Then came new subterfuges and fresh falsehoods, ending, however, in a confession that he had poisoned Jean Kinck with prussic acid, and had buried him in the environs of Watwiller, in Alsace, some time before despatching the other members of his family. Search was made, the body was found, and the solution of the mystery was at length complete. The evidence at the trial showed that Tropmann had ingratiated himself in Kinck's favour, and wormed himself into his confidence, with the set and deliberate purpose to murder him, in order to gain possession of his property. With this view he had fostered Kinck's purpose of visiting Alsace, had accompanied him to Cernay, with his own hand had prepared the poison, which he afterwards poured into the wine flask he carried with him, handing it to Kinck at a moment when the two were in a secluded place, in which he might speedily get rid of the body of his first victim. Then began a system of fraud and forgery by which he induced Madame Kinck and her family to come up to Paris. Foiled in his endeavours to get one of Kinck's cheques cashed, he wrote to Madame Kinck, in her husband's name, telling her a story about an injury to his hand, which compelled him to employ Tropmann as amanuensis, and urging her to come speedily to the capital, where he would meet her. The poor woman, anxious about her husband, and eager to join him, took the fatal journey, and only narrowly missed her last chance of life. Tropmann had directed her to come by a particular train, and had promised to meet her at the station on its arrival. By an accident, however, she reached the terminus some hours earlier, and at once went to the hotel, expecting there to find her husband. Had Tropmann been in she would have found that he was passing under Kinck's name, and this suspicious fact might have led to the discovery of the truth. But the soi-disant Kinck was out, and full of hope and confidence the family party set out to keep the tryst at the previously appointed hour. They met the man who had calmly resolved to take their lives. Without thought of evil, they accompanied him to Pantin, where the mother and the two youngest children got out, accompanying Tropmann to the place where the husband and father was supposed to be staying. They must have gone some little distance, for the coachman, engaged with the prattle of the remaining children, heard nothing to excite his attention. Only twenty minutes had elapsed when Tropmann returned, looking as cool as when he left, and yet in those twenty minutes he had committed three murders, and was bent on committing as many more, in addition to those of the father and his eldest son, both of whom had already fallen by his hand. In the presence of these facts, it is not to be wondered that even the ability and ingenuity of M. Lachaud, who defended the prisoner, failed to discover any ground of defence but that of insanity, which in such a case was but "madness run mad." Never has a criminal been brought to justice for whose offence there was less excuse or extenuation, and the Procureur did but express the sentiments of universal humanity when he urged that the punishment should be equal to the crime. Tropmann was guillotined about three weeks afterwards. OBITUARY OF EMINENT PERSONS DECEASED IN 1869. LORD BROUGHTON. THE RIGHT HON. SIR JOHN CAM HOBHOUSE, G.C.B., P.C., F.R.S., BARON BROUGHTON, of Broughton de Gyffard, in the county of Wilts, and a Baronet, who died on the 3rd of June at his town house in Berkeley-square, was the son of Sir Benjamin Hobhouse, the first baronet, by his wife, Charlotte, daughter and heiress of Samuel Cam, Esq., of Chantry House, Wilts. He was born June 27, 1786, and educated at Westminster School and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1808. He was a most intimate friend of Lord Byron, and accompanied the illustrious poet on his travels in 1809, and was with him during his first visit to Greece and Turkey. Mr. Hobhouse on his return home published an interesting narrative entitled "A Journey through Albania." He was also author of "Imitations and Translations from the Classics, with Original Poems ;" and "The Last Reign of Napoleon." To him Lord Byron dedicated the fourth canto of "Childe Harold." Mr. Hobhouse took advanced Liberal views in politics, and was a zealous and unremitting advocate of Parliamentary Reform. His celebrated letter to Mr. Canning, which appeared in a newspaper of the day, was long remembered as one of the keenest of satires. In December, 1829, he was, in consequence of the letter written by him, which contained some severe remarks on the conduct of certain members of the House of Commons, and which was declared a breach of privilege by that assembly, arrested and imprisoned in Newgate. A few weeks after his incarceration the death of George III. occurred, in 1820, by which Parliament was dissolved, and he obtained his liberation. At the general election of that year he was elected M.P. for Westminster. In February, 1832, he entered Earl Grey's Government as Secretary of War, which office he held till April, 1833. He was Chief Secretary for Ireland in April and May, 1833; Chief Commissioner of Woods and Forests in 1834, but resigned in November of that year. He was President of the Board of Control from April, 1835, to September, 1841, and from July, 1846, to February, 1852. He was M.P. for Westminster from 1820 to 1833; for Nottingham from 1834 to 1847; and for Harwich from 1848 to 1851. He was made a P.C. in 1832, and a G.C.B. in 1852. He succeeded his father as second baronet August 15, 1831, and was raised to the peerage of the United Kingdom as Baron Broughton de Gyffard February 26, 1851. His Lordship married Lady Julia Hay, youngest daughter of George, seventh Marquis of Tweeddale, and by her (who died April 3, 1835) had three daughters. THE EARL OF DERBY, K.G. Edward Geoffrey Smith Stanley, four. teenth Earl of Derby, who died at his residence at Knowsley, near Liverpool, on the 23rd of October, was born at Knowsley, on March 29, 1799, being the eldest son of the thirteenth Earl, then only called Lord Stanley. He was educated at Eton, and at Christ Church College, Oxford, where he gained the Chancellor's prize for a Latin poem on "Syracuse," but took no degree or honours. His literary scholarship, his taste and knowledge of classical poetry, far surpassed the attainments of most University students. He had an equal turn for oratory; and, while yet a boy, would practise elocution under the direction of Lady Derby, his grandfather's second wife, who had been a professional actress. At twenty-two years of age he got a seat in the House of Commons as M.P. for Stockbridge, in Hampshire, a small nomination borough, now defunct. He sat quite silent three or four years, and made his first speech, a clever one, in favour of a private Bill for the lighting of Manchester with gas. The readiness and force of statement he showed on this occasion was noticed by Sir James Mackintosh, a good judge of speakers. Mr. Stanley's second speech was in opposition to Mr. Joseph Hume's motion, on May 6, 1824, for the reduction of the Irish Church Establishment to some proportion with the services it performed. He maintained that the Establishment was of great social use. fulness, and that Church property was as inviolable as any private property. His eloquence was praised by Plunkett. In that month of May the young politician married the Hon. Emma Bootle Wilbraham, second daughter of Baron Skelmersdale, of Latham House, the ownership of Latham having passed from the Stanleys long before and gone to the Bootles. A foreign tour, extending to the United States of America, in company with the late Lord Taunton, then Mr. Labouchere, and with another gentleman, the present Speaker of the House of Commons, took place a year or two later. In his subsequent life Lord Derby seldom cared to travel. He built himself a house called Stanley Lodge at Ballykisteen, in Tipperary, where he would stay three or four months at a time. He was fond of shooting and walking about the country, but made few Irish acquaintances, though his grandfather had large estates there. At the general election of 1826 he gave up his seat for Stockbridge, and was returned for the borough of Preston, where the Earl of Derby owned almost every house in the town. One of Mr. Stanley's speeches of this period was against the Manchester and Liverpool Railway, which traversed the Knowsley estates, when he denounced railways as "a mad and extravagant speculation." The time was now coming for Mr. Stanley to enter the lists of competition for political office. When Canning was authorized to form a Ministry, in 1827, that brilliant statesman, too Liberal for his old party, was deserted by the Eldon and Liverpool set of Tories and by the Duke of Wellington, but was joined by several moderate Whigs, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Goderich, Lord Dudley, Lord Palmerston, and Mr. Stanley. Lord Goderich, afterwards Earl of Ripon, became Secretary for the Colonies, and Mr. Stanley was Under-Secretary; but on the death of Canning, a few months afterwards, Lord Goderich undertook to be Prime Minister. The Colonial Department was now taken by Mr. Huskisson; but Mr. Stanley did not find the Government quite Liberal enough for him. He was a strenuous advocate of Roman Catholic emancipation, of Parliamentary reform, reciprocity in free trade, with a moderate fixed duty on corn, and the Liberal foreign policy of Mr. Canning. "I am convinced," he said, "that the old and stubborn spirit of Toryism is at last yielding to the liberality of the age-that the Tories of the old school, the sticklers for inveterate abuses under the name of the wisdom of our ancestors, the laudatores temporis acti, are giving way on all sidesthat the spirit which supported the Holy Alliance, the friend of despotism rather than the advocate of struggling freedom, is hastening to the fate it merits, and that all its attendant evils are daily becoming matters which belong to history alone." Such were the sentiments of Mr. Stanley. From the autumn of 1828, during the Administrations of Lord Goderich and the Duke of Wellington, and until the accession of Lord Grey to power, in 1830, Mr. Stanley remained out of office. In the Whig Ministry of that momentous period, Mr. Stanley, then about thirty years of age, was a member of the Cabinet, as Chief Secretary for Ireland. He had lost his seat for Preston in spite of the Derby local influence, being there defeated by Henry Hunt, the ultra-Radical declaimer, in a fierce election contest, and taking refuge in the Crown borough of Windsor. Mr. Stanley was quite as earnest as Lord John Russell, and much more vehement, in his advocacy of the Reform Bill. It is said that, when the House of Lords first rejected the Bill, and a Tory Government was to be formed, he leaped upon the table at Brookes's Club and harangued his political friends, proposing that they should recommend to the people a general refusal of taxes. Mr. Stanley had charge, more especially, of the Irish Reform Bill. |