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We say that the subject of a picture is the spirit of natural fact. If Botticelli was a painter, that is what he must have looked for, and must have found, in every picture he painted. Where, then, was he to get his natural facts in the story of Judith? It is murder. Judith's deed was what the old Scots law incisively calls slauchter.
James I. says that the devil, when appearing to men, frequently assumed the form of a person newly dead, "to make them believe that it was some good spirit that appeared to them, either to forewarn them of the death of their friend, or else to discover unto them the will of the defunct, or what was the way of his slauchter.... For he dare not so illude anie that knoweth that neither can the spirit of the defunct returne to his friend, nor yet an angell use such formes."
"I think it is an orang-outang," remarked Phil, "and he would make short work of us if he came down." Mac gazed dubiously at the animal. "A'll slauchter him," said he, raising his deadly blunderbuss; but the huge ape seemed to understand the action, and with half a dozen bounds he had vanished, swinging from tree to tree like a living pendulum.
In 1424 it was enacted that "Quha sa ever be convict of Slauchter of Salmonde in tyme forbidden be the Law, he shall pay fourtie shillings for the unlaw, and at the third tyme gif he be convict of sik Trespasse he shall tyne his life."
This doesn't injure the verse, you see, as blaw and snaw rhyme just as well as blow and snow, beside bringing tears to the common eye with their poetic associations. Similarly, if we had daughter and slaughter, we were to write them dochter and slauchter, substituting in all cases doon, froon, goon, and toon, for down, frown gown, and town.
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