pin, or bodkin of gold into his right ear, well knowing that the same entering into his brain, would cause his instantaneous dissolution.  Master Nicolais, it appeared, in sawing open the skull of the deceased with anatomical science and precision, had found a pin or Golden Bodkin like that described in the indictment, and like what were at this period much used by ladies in fastening up their hair, bearing the initials, V.M. which he perceived had been violently thrust through the orifice of the ear, into the brain of the unfortunate victim.  This inference as to the fiendish murderer was inevitable, and just; and the horror-struck practitioner scrupled not to incite the relations of the late marquess to summon witnesses, and lay a criminal information against Victorine de Villeroi as principal in, and Armand de Villeroi as accessary to, this abominable transaction.  Upon trial, the innocence of the Comte, as to the slightest knowledge of his wife’s secret and heinous crime, was so apparent that it ensured him an honourable acquittal; but the guilt of that wretched woman being established beyond all doubt by the evidence of the goldsmith who had made for her, and engraved her initials upon, the Golden Bodkin, of the domestics who had seen her when their master fell asleep during the vespers at St. Genevieve, put her hand beneath his head as if with the intent of waking, and raising him up, and subsequently by her own confession, her guilt was thus incontrovertibly established.  She suffered those extreme penalties of the law which the heinous nature of her crime demanded, and fully justified.

This historiette, in the leading incidents of which, every Frenchman at all acquainted with the Causes Celebres of his country, will detect matters of fact, we have “made a prief of in our notebook,” as one of those interesting cases, (not less remarkable because of rather frequent occurrence) which incontestably prove, that under the just government of the Omniscient, who hath willed that “Whosoever sheddeth the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.”—­Murder will out!

M.L.B.

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THE SELECTOR AND LITERARY NOTICES OF NEW WORKS.

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POLAND.

Dr. Lardner has commenced a “Library,” as a kind of succedaneum to his valuable “Cyclopaedia.”  Both are styled Cabinet, and the first may be considered an amplification of the second.  Two of the Cabinet Library volumes contain a Retrospect of Public Affairs for 1831—­not a chronology of shreds and patches, but a well-digested review of the great events of the year—­and important indeed they are.  The work is the quintessence of an “Annual Register:”  it is not so porous and pursy as the last mentioned book, but is a pleasant volume to put in one’s pocket and read inside a coach, if the passengers will allow