Dunne again. The storm of objurgations, appeals, confutations, bursts forth with increased force; poor Dunne slips into a fatal admission : he has admitted some talk, but cannot explain what it was. He tries dogged silence. The torture of Jeffreys' tongue urges him to fresh blundering. A candle is held up to his nose that the court "may see his brazen face." At last he exclaims, the candle "still nearer to his nose," and feeling himself the very focus of all attention, "I am quite cluttered out of my senses; I do not know what I say." The wretched creature is allowed to reflect for a time, and then at last declares that he will tell the truth. He tells enough in fact for the purpose, though be feebly tries to keep back the most damning words. Enough has been wrenched out of him to send poor Lady Lisle to the scaffold. The figure of the poor old lady falling asleep, as it is said, while Jeffreys' thunder and lightning was raging in this terrific fashion round the feeble defence of Dunne's reticence, is so pathetic, and her fate so piteous and disgraceful, that we have little sense for anything but Jeffreys' brutality. But if the power of worming the truth out of a grudging witness were the sole test of a judge's excellence, we must admit the amazing efficiency of Jeffreys' method. He is the ideal cross-examiner, and we may overlook the cruelty to victims who have so long ceased to suffer.

In the post-revolutionary period the world becomes more merciful and duller. Lawyers speak at greater length; and even the victims of '45, the strange Lord Lovat himself, give little sport at the respectable bar of the House of Lords. But the domestic trials become perhaps more interesting, if only by way of commentary upon Tom Jones or Roderick Random. Novelists indeed have occasionally sought to turn these records to account. The great Annesley case has been used by Mr. Charles Reade, and Scott took some hints from it in one of the very best of his performances, the inimitable Guy Mannering. Scott's adaptation should, indeed, be rather a warning than a precedent; for the surpassing merit of his great novel consists in the display of character, in Meg Merrilies and Dandie Dinmont and Counsellor Pleydell, and certainly not in the rather childish plot with the long-lost heir business. He falls into the common error of supposing that the actual occurrence of events must be a sufficient guarantee for employing them in fiction. The Annesley case is almost the only one in the collection in which facts descend to the level of romance. The claimant's case was clearly established up to a certain point. There was no doubt that he had passed for Lord Annesley's son in his childhood; that he had for that reason been spirited away by his uncle, and sold as a slave in America; and, further, that when he returned to make his claim and killed a man by accident (an incident used by Scott)—that his uncle did his best to have him convicted for murder. The more difficult point was to prove that he was the legitimate son of the deceased lord by his wife, who was also dead. A servant of the supposed mother gave evidence which, if true, conclusively disproved this assumption; and though young Annesley won his first

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trial, he afterwards failed to convict this witness of perjury. may therefore be still doubtful, though the weight of evidence seems decidedly against the claimant. The case-the "longest ever known" at that time-lasted fifteen days, and gives some queer illustrations of the domestic life of a disreputable Irish nobleman of the period. Perhaps, however, the most curious piece of evidence is given by the attorney who was employed to prosecute the claimant for a murder of which he was clearly innocent. "What was the intention of the prosecution?" he is asked. "To put this man out of the way that he (Lord Anglesea, the uncle) might enjoy the estate easy and quiet." "You understood, then, that Lord Anglesea would give 10,000l. to get the plaintiff hanged? "I did." "Did you not apprehend that to be a most wicked crime?" "If so, how could you engage in that project, without making any objection to it?" "I may as well ask you," is the reply, "how you came to be engaged in this suit." He is afterwards asked whether any honest man would do such an action. "Yes, I believe they would, or else I would not have carried it on." This is one of the prettiest instances on record of that ingenious adaptation of the conscience, which allows a man to think himself thoroughly honest for committing a most wicked crime in his professional capacity. The novelist who wishes rather to display character than to amuse us with intricacies of plot, will find more matter in less ambitious narratives. A most pathetic romance, which may remind us of more famous fictions, underlies the great murder case in which Cowper the poet's grandfather was defendant. Sarah Stout, the daughter of a Quaker at Hertford, fell desperately in love with Cowper, who was a barrister, and sometimes lodged at her father's house when on circuit. She wrote passionate letters to him of the Eloïse to Abelard kind, which Cowper was ultimately forced to produce in evidence. He therefore had a final interview with her, explained to her the folly of her passion, there being already a Mrs. Cowper, and left her late in the evening to go to his lodgings elsewhere. Poor Sarah Stout rushed out in despair and threw herself into the Priory river. There she was found dead next morning, when the miller came to pull up his sluices. All the gossips of Hertford came immediately to look at the body and make moral or judicial reflections upon the facts. Wiseacres suggested that Cowper was the last man seen in her company, and it came out that two or three other men attending the assizes had gossiped about her on the previous evening, and one of them had, strange to relate, left a cord close by his trunk. These facts, transfigured by the Hertford imagination, became the nucleus of a theory, set forth in delicious legal verbosity, that the said Cowper, John Masson, and others "a certain rope of no value about the neck of the said Sarah, then and there feloniously, voluntarily, and of malice aforethought did put, place, fix, and bind; and the neck and throat of the said Sarah, then and there with the hands of you, the said Cowper, Masson, Stephens, and Rogers, feloniously, voluntarily, and of your malice aforethought, did hold,

squeeze, and gripe." By the said squeezing and griping, to abbreviate a little, Sarah Stout was choked and strangled; and being choked and strangled instantly died, and was then secretly and maliciously put and cast into the river. The evidence, it is plain, required a little straining, but then Cowper belonged to the great Whig family of the town, and Sarah Stout was a Quaker. Tories thought it would be well to get a Cowper hanged, and Quakers wished to escape the imputation that one of their sect had committed suicide. The trial lasted so long that the poor judge became faint and confessed that he could not sum up properly. The whole strength of the case, however, such as it was, depended upon an ingenious theory set up by the prosecution, to the effect that the bodies of the drowned always sink, whereas Miss Stout was found floating, and must therefore have been dead before she was put in the river. The chief witness was a sailor, who swore that this doctrine as to sinking and swimming was universal in the navy. He had seen the shipwreck of the ". Coronation" in 1691. "We saw the ship sink down," he says, "and they swam up and down like a shoal of fish one over another, and I see them hover one upon another, and see them drop away by scores at a time;" some nine escaped, "but there were no more saved out of the ship's complement, which was between 500 and 600, and the rest I saw sinking downright, twenty at a time.” He has a clinching argument, though a less graphic instance, to prove that men already dead do not sink. "Otherwise, why should Government be at that vast charge to allow threescore or fourscore weight of iron to sink every man, but only that their swimming about should not be a discouragement to others?" Cowper's scientific witnesses, some of the medical bigwigs of the day, had very little trouble in confuting this evidence but the letters which he at last produced, and the evidence that poor Miss Stout had been talking of suicide, should have made the whole story clear even to the bemuddled judges. The novelist would throw into the background this crowd of gossiping and malicious quidnuncs of Hertford; but we must be content to catch glimpses of her previous history from these absurdly irrelevant twaddlings, as in actual life we catch sight of tragedies below the surface of social small-talk. Sarah Stout was clearly a Maggie Tulliver, a potential heroine, unable to be happy amidst the broad-brimmed, drab-coated respectabilities of quiet little Hertford. Her rebellion was rasher than Maggie's, but perhaps in a more characteristic fashion. The case suggests the wish that Mr. Stephen Guest might have been hanged on some such suspicion as was nearly fatal to Cowper.

Half a century later our ancestors were in a state of intense excitement about another tragedy of a darker kind. Mary Blandy, the only daughter of a gentleman at Henley, made acquaintance with a Captain Cranstoun, who was recruiting in the town. The father objected to a marriage, from a suspicion, apparently well founded, that Cranstoun was already married in Scotland. Thereupon Mary Blandy

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administered to her father certain powders sent to her by Cranstoun. According to her own account, she intended them as a kind of charm to act upon her father's affections. As they were, in fact, composed of arsenic, they soon put an end to her father altogether, and it is too clear that she really knew what she was doing. It was sworn that she used brutal and unfeeling language about the poor old man's sufferings, for the poison was given at intervals during some months. But the pathetic touch which moved the sympathies of contemporaries was the behaviour of the father. In the last day or two of his life, he was told that his daughter had been the cause of his fatal illness. His comment was: "Poor lovesick girl! What will not a woman do for the man she loves." When she came to his room his only thought was apparently to comfort her. His most reproachful phrase was: Thee should have considered better than to have attempted anything against thy father." daughter went down on her knees and begged him not to curse her. curse thee!" he exclaimed. "My dear, how couldst thou think I should curse thee? No, I bless thee, and hope God will bless thee and amend thy life." And then he added, "Do, my dear, go out of the room and say no more, lest thou shouldst say anything to thy prejudice; go to thy uncle Stevens, take him for thy friend; poor man, I am sorry for him." The tragedy behind these homely words is almost too pathetic and painful for dramatic purposes; and it is not strange that our ancestors were affected. The sympathy, however, took the queer illogical twist which perhaps, who can tell? it might do at the present day. Miss Blandy became a sort of quasi saint, the tenderness due to the murdered man extended itself to his murderer, and her penitence profoundly edified all observers. Crowds of people flocked to see her in chapel, and she accepted the homage gracefully. She was extremely shocked, we are told, by one insinuation made by uncharitable persons; namely, that her intimacy with Cranstoun, who was supposed to be a freethinker, might justify doubts upon her orthodoxy. She declared that he had always talked to her "perfectly in the style of a Christian," and she had read the works of some of our most celebrated divines. In spite of her moving conduct, however, the "prejudices she had to struggle with had taken too deep root in some men's minds" to allow of her getting a pardon. And so, 5,000 people saw poor Miss Blandy mount the ladder in "a black bombazine, short sack and petticoat," on an April morning at Oxford, and many, "particularly several gentlemen of the University," were observed to shed tears. She left a declaration of innocence which, in spite of its solemnity, must have been a lie; and which contained an allusion from which it appears that Miss Blandy, like other prisoners, was suspected of previous crimes.

"It is shocking to think," says Horace Walpole, in noticing Miss Blandy's case, "what a shambles this country has become. Seventeen were executed this morning, after having murdered the turnkey on Friday night, and almost forced open Newgate." Another woman was

hanged in the same year for murdering her uncle at Walthamstow; and the public could talk about nothing but the marriage of the Miss Gunnings and the hanging of two murderesses. Fielding, then approaching the end of his career, was moved by this and other atrocities to publish a queer collection of instances of the providential punishment of murderers. Another famous author of the day was commonly said to have turned a famous murder to account in a different fashion. Foote, it is said, was introduced at a club in the words, "This is the nephew of the gentleman who was lately hung in chains for murdering his brother;" and it is added that Foote's first pamphlet was an account of this disagreeable domestic incident. A more serious author might have found in it materials for a striking narrative. Captain Goodere commanded his Majesty's ship Ruby, lying in the King's Road off Bristol. He had a quarrel with his brother, Sir John Goodere, about a certain estate. The family solicitor arranged a meeting in his house, where the two brothers appeared to be reconciled. But Sir John had scarcely left the house, when he was seized in broad daylight by a set of sailors who had been drinking in a public-house, and carried down forcibly to the Captain's barge. The Captain himself followed and rowed off with his brother to the ship. There Sir John was confined in a cabin, a suggestion being thrown out to the crew that he was a madman. A few hours later, one Mahony, who played the part of "hairy-faced Dick" to Hamilton Tighe, strangled the unfortunate man, with an accomplice called White. Attention had been aroused amongst the crew by ominous sounds, groans and scufflings heard in the dead of night, and next morning, the lieutenant, after a talk with the surgeon, resolved to seize their captain for murder. A more outrageous and reckless proceeding, indeed, could scarcely have been imagined, even in the days when a press-gang was a familiar sight, and the captain of a ship at sea was as absolute as an Eastern despot. Every detail seemed to be arranged with an express view to publicity. One piece of evidence, however, was required to bring the matter home to the captain; and it is of ghastly picturesqueness. The ship's cooper and his wife were sleeping in the cabin next to the scene of the murder. The cooper had heard the poor man exclaim that he was going to be murdered, and praying that the murder might come to light. This, however, seemed to be the wandering of a madman, and the cooper went to sleep. Presently his wife called him up: "I believe they are murdering the gentleman." He heard broken words and saw a light glimmering through a crevice in the partition. Peeping through, he could distinguish the two ruffians, standing with a candle over the dead body and taking a watch from a pocket. And then, through the gloom, he made out a hand upon the throat of the victim. The owner of the hand was invisible; but it was whiter than that of a common sailor. "I have often seen Mahony's and White's hands," he added, "and I thought the hand was whiter than either of theirs." The trembling cooper wanted to leave the cabin,