the murder of one's parents or children. By the Roman law, it was punished in a much severer manner than any other kind of homicide. After being scourged, the delinquents were sewed up in a leathern sack, with a live dog, a cock, a viper, and an ape, and so cast into the sea. Solon, it is true, in his laws, made none against parricide; apprehending it impossible that one should be guilty of so unnatural a barbarity. And the Persians, according to Herodotus, entertained the same notion, when they adjudged all persons who killed their reputed parents to be bastards. And upon some such reason as this must we account for the omission of an exemplary punishment for this crime in our English laws; which treat it no otherwise than as simple murder, unless the child was also the servant of the parent.

For though the breach of natural relation is unobserved, yet the breach of civil or ecclesiastic connections, when coupled with murder, denominates it a new offence; no less than a species of treason, called parva pruditia, or petit treason: which, however, is nothing else but an aggravated degree of murder; although, on account of the violation of private allegiance, it is stigmatized as an inferior species of treason. And thus, in the ancient Gothic constitution, we find the breach both of natural and civil relations ranked in the same class with crimes against the state and sovereign.