REVIEW.

The Life and Death of John William Marchant, who suffered the extreme penalty of the law, in front of the Debtor’s door, Newgate, on Monday, July 8th, 1839, for the murder of Elizabeth Paynton, his fellow servant, on the seventeenth of May last, in Cadogan Place, Chelsea. By John Morgan. London: J. Catnach, 2 and 3, Monmouth Court, 7 Dials.

The work is a quarto page, surrounded with a handsome black border. “Take no thought for to-morrow, what thou shalt eat, or what thou shalt put on,” says a certain writer, whose wisdom we all reverence, and then he adds “Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof”—a remark particularly applicable to the bards of Seven Dials, whose pens are kept in constant employment by the fires, rapes, robberies, and murders, which, from one year’s end to the other, present them with a daily allowance of evil sufficient for their subsistence. But, at present, it is only one of these poets, “John Morgan,” as he modestly signs himself, whom we are about to notice; and as some of our readers may be curious to see a specimen of the poetry of Seven Dials, we shall lay certain portions of John Morgan’s last effusion before them, pointing out the beauties and peculiarities of the compositions as we go along. After almost lawyer-like particularity as to dates and places, the poem begins with an invocation from the murderer in propria personæ.

“Oh! give attention awhile to me,
All you good people of each degree;
In Newgate’s dismal and dreary cell,
I bid all people on earth farewell.”

Heaven forbid, say we, that all the people on earth should ever get in Newgate, to receive the farewell of such a blood-thirsty miscreant.

“John William Marchant is my name,
I do confess I have been to blame.”

And here we must observe that the poet makes his hero speak of his offence rather too lightly, as if, indeed, it had been nothing more than a common misdemeanour.

“I little thought, my dear parents kind,
I should leave this earth with a troubled mind.”

Now this is modest; he is actually surprised that his parents are at all grieved at the idea of getting rid of such a scoundrel, and well he might be.

“I lived as servant in Cadogan Place,
And never thought this would be my case,
To end my days on the fatal tree:
Good people, pray drop a tear for me.”

There is a playfulness about the word “drop,” introducing just here after “the fatal tree,” which, in our mind, somewhat diminishes the plaintiveness of the entreaty; but we must not be hypocritical.

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Then comes his trial and condemnation, the account of which is most remarkable precise and pithy.

“At the Old Bailey I was tried and cast,
And the dreadful sentence on me was past
On a Monday morning, alas! to die,
And on the eight of this month of July.”

A marvellous particularity as to dates, intended, doubtless, to show the convicts anxiety that, although he died young, his name should live long in the minds of posterity. Then follows his farewell to father and mother, and an impudent expression of confidence that his crime will be forgiven in heaven, an idea, by-the-by, which is reported to have been confirmed by the Ordinary of Newgate, who told him that the angels would receive him with great affection; and this it was, perhaps, which induced our bard of Seven Dials to represent his hero as coolly writing poetry up to the very last moment of his existence; taking his farewell of the public in these words:—

“Adieu, good people of each degree,
And take a warning, I pray, by me;
The bell is tolling, and I must go,
And leave this world of misery and woe.”

But we cannot exactly see what business the fellow—“a pampered menial,” had to speak ill of the world, when he was very comfortably off in it, and might have lived long and happily if it had not been for his own wickedness; a hint which we throw out for the benefit of Mr. John Morgan, in his future effusions, trusting he will not make his heroes die grumby, when poetic justices does not require it.

But we must now take our leave, with a hearty wish to the whole fraternity of Seven Dials’ bards, that they may never go without a dinner for want of the means of earning it, or that, in other words, though they seem somewhat contradictory, “Sufficient unto the day may be the evil thereof.”

“This Ballad—‘Little Lord John out of Service’—is one of the few which bear a signature—it is signed ‘John Morgan’ in the copy which we possess. For a long time we believed this name to be a mere nom-de-plume; but the other day in Monmouth Court, we were informed, in answer to a casual question that this is the real name of the author of some of the best comic ballads. Our informant added that he is an elderly, we may say old, gentleman, living somewhere in Westminster; but the exact whereabouts we could not discover. Mr. Morgan followed no particular visible calling, so far as our informant knew, except writing ballads, by which he could not earn much of a livelihood, as the price of an original ballad, in these buying-cheap days, has been screwed down by the publishers to somewhere about a shilling sterling. Something more like bread-and-butter might be made, perhaps, by poets who were in the habit of singing their own ballads, as some of them do, but not Mr. Morgan. Should this ever meet the eye of that gentleman (a not very probable event, we fear), we beg to apologise for the liberty we have taken in using his verses and name, and hope he will excuse us, having regard to the subject in which we are humble fellow-labourers. We could scarcely avoid naming him, the fact being that he is the only living author of street-ballads whose name we know. That self-denying mind, indifferent to worldly fame, which characterised the architects of our cathedrals and abbeys, would seem to have descended on our ballad-writers; and we must be thankful, therefore, to be able to embalm and hand down to posterity a name here and there, such as William of Wykeham, and John Morgan. In answer to our inquiries in this matter, generally, we have been told, ‘Oh, anybody writes them,’ and with that answer we have had to rest satisfied. But in presence of that answer, we walk about the streets with a new sense of wonder, peering into the faces of those of our fellow-lieges