The Sun.
London, England, 1850-10-05 00:00:00

THE FRIMLEY MURDER.

For the crime of murder, as it ordinarily shows
itself in this country, we are seldom called upon to
exhibit other feelings than those of horror at the deed,
and disgust at the vices of which it seemed the mon-
strous but natural offspring. The low intrigues of the
Mannings and their victim, and the besotted lives of
'others, were so unlikely, except by the interposition of
a miracle, to end well, that we find nothing to bestow our
sympathy upon—we can only lament that human nature
should become so brutalized as to revel in human
slaughter, or design it through days and weeks of
malignant deliberation. But it does happen now and
then that our horror at one aspect of the tragedy
finds relief—though in some sort augmentation, too—
in contemplating the other. We have not to turn
from the murderer to a victim who awakens alnioat
equal feelings of horror at the unprepared death
of a drunkard or a paramour. There is some-
thing consolatory for the miad to rest upon. The
victim has fallen before nature's hour, indeed,
but not wholly unanointed. He has lived well
through the trials of many years, or was working his
way onward to a venerated age. There are children
to lament him ; affectionate friends and neighbours ;
dependents upheld by his bounty; a train of suffer-
ing poor to add their tribute of grief, which, even if
to some extent selfish, bears the strongest testimony
to the worth of the departed. There is brightness in
' all this, not unmixed with awe, but perhaps the
brighter on that account. The death of a good man
is a subject for edifying thought at all times ; but
when he dies by violence his virtues become hallowed
by the contrast with his end.
The Frimley murder is exactly such a case. We
have to lament the untimely death of a man discharg-
ing the responsible duties of a minister of the Church
of England, and surrounded by all the respect and
affection which Character and station might command.
He had just loosed' his heart to delight over the pro-
gress of his children, who came to spend a few days
by their father's fireside ; to report their studies ; to
draw inspiration from his example and the precepts of
his love and anxiety. One can imagine the homely
" Good night " which separated parents and chil-
dren for a brief space only, as they thought,
to meet and renew t happy intercourse of
their relationship. Bur even under that roof
then) was nothing so venerable as to awe the thief,
or paralyze him ere be committed the deed which
made him also a murderer. The sacred functions of
its tenant were forgotten in the plunder of his com-
parative wealth. In the dead hour of night his bed-
chamber was visited. He started from sleep,
roused by a glare of light ; and, unsuspicious of
evil, set the intrusion down to some playful
experiment of his sons, till the robber's pistol was
at his breast. Then came a struggle, fearful and
fatal. And if, while recording the tragedy that
followed, we may dare to speak of human courage,
we would say 'one word for that devoted woman who,
with the beautiful instincts of her sex, threw heart and
life into the etiOrt to save her husband. Unarmed
and unassisted—except, perhaps, by the terror which
seized the villains, who counted upon meeting as
great cowards as themselves—they drove the assassins
trom the house ; but not before a fatal wound had been
inflicted.
We write under the anxiety and horror which by
this time has universally impressed the country. But
an article in a morning contemporary places this mur-
der in a light which, for practical purposes, is invalu-
able. For some months a gang of burglars has
infested the country in the neighbourhood ofFrienley.
We hear now of the acuteness which characterizes
the local police ; but we hear of it, unfortunately,
when too late. A little earlier exertion of this faculty
might have spared us the sorrow of adding this new
tragedy to the list of those horrors which terrify us,
when we consider how near an approach, eveu in
this world, it is possible for men of uncontrolled pas-
sions to make to the malignity of demons.—From the
Lady's Newspaper.