Transmission of Criminal Traits. long suit before the House of Lords with Sir Humphrey Ferrers and Sir Richard Brooke, who had married her Pakington daughters. She married, fourthly, Thomas Krskine, 1st Earl of Kellie (his third wife), who had succeeded Raleigh in 1603 as Cap tain of the Yeomen of the Guard, an es pecial favorite of James I., one of the Privy Council, etc. " The Earl of Kellie s dif ferences with his last wife were so serious as to require the intervention of King Charles himself" The Earl of Kellie died in 1639. The date of the death of Lady Dorothy is not known to me. Bacon's mother-in-law was certainly of an ancient Leicestershire family; she was re lated to the Caves, the Cecils, the Skipwiths, etc. She was frequently well married her self; she lived to see all of her children suitably married; and she saw to it herself
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that they were properly provided for. She wielded a vigorous pen, and probably gave her husbands and her sons-in-law cause to think that she had a sharp tongue. Yet there must have been something very attrac tive about " the little violent lady;" for, not withstanding these drawbacks, she no sooner lost one husband than she found another; and, regardless of her advancing years, she constantly took an advance step matrimonial in the social scale at each succeeding ven ture, — her first husband being an alderman, her second a knight, her third a viscount, and her fourth an earl. There is still something very attractive in the picture of this " little violent lady," in her " great wars " with her husbands and her sons-in-law, and we must regret very much that Bacon failed to leave us an essay on the mother-in-law.
TRANSMISSION OF CRIMINAL TRAITS. THAT criminality, like moral greatness, "runs in the blood," there can be no doubt. It would in fact be a most unwonted violation of the commonest law of Nature, were we to find the children of criminals free from the moral taints of their parents. As physical disease is transmissible, and as the conditions regulating its descent are now tol erably well ascertained, so moral infirmities pass from one generation to another, and the "law of likeness " is thus seen to hold true of mind as well as of body. Numerous in stances might be cited of the transmission of criminal traits of character, often of very marked and special kind. Dr. Despine, a continental writer, gives one very re markable case illustrating the transmission from one generation to another of an extraor dinary tendency to thieve and steal. The subjects of the memoir in question were a family named Chretien, of which the com mon ancestor, so to speak, Jean Chretien by
name, had three sons, Pierre, Thomas, and Jean-Baptiste. Pierre in his turn had one son, who was sentenced to penal servitude for life for robbery and murder. Thomas had two sons, one of whom was condemned to a like sentence for murder; the other be ing sentenced to death for a like crime. Of the children of Jean-Baptiste, one son, Jean-Francois, married one Marie Taure, who came of a family noted for their ten dency to the crime of incendiarism. Seven children were born to this couple with avow edly criminal antecedents on both sides. Of these, one son, Jean-Francois, named after his father, died in prison after undergoing various sentences for robberies. Another son, Benoist, was killed by falling off a houseroof which he had scaled in the act of theft; and a third son, "Clain" by nickname, after being convicted of several robberies, died at the age of twenty-five. Victor, a fourth son, was also a criminal; Marie-Reine, a daughter,
