XIII. Death by Suicide. "The term of life is limited, Nor may a man prolong nor shorten it: SPENSER. By the same physical power which can destroy the life of another, man can fix a sudden period to his own. If at any time he become so weary of his present state, and so hopeless for the future, that he prefers the uncertainties, or imagines that he prefers the certainties of death, the temptation to suicide may be at hand, unless repelled by higher sentiments of duty. These sentiments may be overpowered by frenzy, supplanted by selfishness, silenced by pride, or extinguished by atheism; and then the man may be his own destroyer. Both Abimelech and Saul were already wounded to death, when they besought their attendants to give the finishing blow. Ahithophel, rejected as a counsellor, and despairing of a wicked cause, went and hanged himself; a mode of death, which, possibly because the horror of bloodshed was wanting, has always been a ready suggestion. Such was the death of the traitor Iscariot, when the full anguish of his guilt burst upon him, and drove him to despair; and Pontius Pilate, long years after, died too by his own hand. The chief senators of Saguntum, when their city was about to be taken, threw themselves into the same flames in which they consumed their treasures. Josephus relates how, when Jotapata was captured, he, with forty others, was hidden in a pit, where suicide was preferred by all the rest to a surrender; and lots being cast at his suggestion, he who had the first lot was slain by him who had the second, till Josephus and another were alone left. In the days of Richard the First, more than five hundred Jews are said to have destroyed themselves at York, to escape their persecutors. Eight hundred mothers and children, when Missolonghi was conquered by the Turks, fled from their cruelty, and cast themselves into the sea to perish there. It was made a question in the age when Rome was sacked by Alaric, whether those Christian virgins who preserved their purity only by casting themselves into the Tiber, had violated the divine law; and their act was excused rather than justified by St. Augustin. Sardanapalus, the last Assyrian emperor, died with his eunuchs, wives, and concubines, on one vast pile, amidst his treasures, while his enemies burst in upon. his capital. Imilcon, the Carthaginian general, slew himself after ill success; and Annibal, who always carried poison in a ring upon his finger, used it when he saw before him only his enemies and ignominy. It is said that Bajazet, confined in a cage by the victorious Timour, perished by dashing himself desperately against the bars. Men in Japan, under very common mortifications or losses, plunge a knife into their bowels. For ages, till British rule dissolved the murderous spell, the Hindoo widow had mounted the pyre with the corpse of her husband; and the Hindoo devotee had lain down before the wheels of the car of Juggernaut. Within thirty miles around Calcutta, two hundred widows sacrificed themselves in a year; and female slaves sometimes threw themselves also into the flames. When all hope of safety was at an end, Demosthenes swallowed some fatal substance, and fell dead in the temple of Neptune. But suicide never became to the enjoying Greeks, what it was amongst the iron Romans, the almost usual resource of great men under misfortune. From the treatise of Plato on the immortality of the soul, Cato arose to plunge the dagger into his own body. Brutus fell upon his sword; and Cassius ordered his freedman to run him through. Portia, the wife of Brutus and daughter of Cato, swallowed burning coals. Mark Antony stabbed himself; and Cleopatra died by the bite of an asp, which she placed on her arm or bosom. Piso opened veins in both his arms. Nero was compelled to destroy himself or be destroyed, and tremblingly inflicted a fatal wound. Otho, after an unfortunate battle, calmly slew himself with a dagger. The elder Gordian, Julia Domna, widow of the emperor Severus, Pœtus, and, giving him the example, his wife Arria, died this "Roman death." In Christian lands, it has been left, with few exceptions, to the maniac and the unbeliever.. The Venetian admiral, Dandolo, taken prisoner by the Genoese, was insultingly exposed, and in a frenzy dashed his head against the side of the galley and was taken up dead. England was said to have the unhappy distinction of an undue proportion of suicides, from melancholy and discouragement. The Earl of Northumberland, committed to the Tower in the reign PROPERTY THE WASHINGTON HEIGHTS LIBRAR Queen Elizabeth, was found dead with three bullets in his body; and the Earl of Essex, under Charles the Second, in circumstances exactly the same, appeared to have cut his throat in the same gloomy prison. Creech, the translator of several classics, Budgell, one of the writers of the Spectator, who threw himself into the Thames, and young Chatterton, who took arsenic, are the only English authors, whom distress and sadness have driven to so desperate an end. Maitland of Lethington, a sagacious man of intrigue, poisoned himself, to shun the block. Sir Robert Calder and Colonel Brereton were goaded by the loss of professional reputation. But most often perhaps the suicidal blow has been struck under sudden delirium, or the gloom of derangement; for this is one of the most frequent and the most frightful perils of insanity. Three conspicuous statesmen in one age, Whitbread, Romilly, and the Marquess of Londonderry, died thus by their own hands; and thus died Lord Clive the conqueror of Bengal. When the French nation caught the spirit of unbelief, in a period of immense political revolutions, the heathen practice of suicide revived with the heathen uncertainty of life hereafter. Many of the democratic leaders, in their downfall, attempted thus to escape, and many succeeded in thus escaping, the guillotine; like Petion, who was found dead in a field; Roland, who ran himself through with a stiletto by the road-side; Condorcet, who carried poison, and used it in prison; Rebecqui, who threw himself into the sea; Valaze, who stabbed himself when his sentence was pronounced; and those five, with Romme the mathematician at their head, who plunged the dagger successively into their breasts, before the judges could interpose, each passing it to the next as he fell wounded, and three of them dying on the spot. Berthier, a favourite of Napoleon, threw himself from a window, in delirium; and Junot, too, with an alienated intellect, accomplished his own destruction. Christophe, deposed and deserted, shot himself with a pistol. Admiral Villeneuve took an anatomical plate of the heart, marked the exact spot, and then, at that spot, drove a pin into his own heart, and expired. Every week, indeed, bears its tale of suicide. Men, like the painter Haydon, made desperate by misfortunes or mistakes; men overwhelmed with sudden disgrace, by the detection of crime; men and women, under the pangs of blighted affection; women for whose fair fame there is no refuge; men weary of the world, and anticipating only an old age without enjoyment; even children under an exasperated bitterness, which has made them willing to revenge themselves by the pain which their death might inflict; all have dared to tear asunder the soul and the body which their Maker had united. They have been found hanging in garrets, barns, or lonely rooms, by ropes or handkerchiefs, even with their knees resting on the floor: they have cast themselves from wharves, and the decks of vessels, and high edifices: they have swallowed arsenic, laudanum, prussic acid, every variety of poison; they have drawn the razor across the throat; they have placed the muzzle of the pistol in the mouth or ear, and thrown the shattered bone and brains upon the wall. After a desperate sea-fight, the conquered commander has set fire to the magazine. Murderers in their cells have often been their own executioners. A shipwrecked man has even been known to shoot himself rather than die by drowning. Romantic and godless lovers, in France, have chosen to die together, |