arrangement that they might agree upon. Saying this, she presented him with the candle; which he in a moment placed upon the table, and, intercepting her retreat from the room, threw his arms around her neck with a gesture as though he meant to kiss her. This was evidently what she herself anticipated, and endeavoured to prevent. Her horror may be imagined when she felt the perfidious hand that clasped her neck armed with a razor, and violently cutting her throat. She was hardly able to utter one scream before she sank powerless upon the floor. This dreadful spectacle was witnessed by the boy; who was not asleep, but had presence of mind enough instantly to close his eyes. The murderer advanced hastily to the bed, and anxiously examined the expression of the boy's features: satisfied he was not, and he then placed his hand upon the boy's heart, in order to judge by its beatings whether he were agitated or not. This was a dreadful trial; and no doubt the counterfeit sleep would immediately have been detected, when suddenly a dreadful spectacle drew off the attention of the murderer. Solemnly, and in ghostly silence, uprose in her dying delirium the murdered girl; she stood upright, she walked steadily for a moment or two, she bent her steps towards the door. The murderer turned away to pursue her; and at that moment the boy, feeling that his one solitary chance was to fly whilst this scene was in progress, bounded out of bed. On the landing at the head of the stairs was one murderer ; at the foot of the stairs was the other: who could believe that the boy had the shadow of a chance for escaping? And yet, in the most natural way, he surmounted all hindrances. In the boy's horror, he laid his left hand on the balustrade, and took a flying leap over it, which landed him at the bottom of the stairs, without having touched a single stair. He had thus effectually passed one of the murderers: the other, it is true, was still to be passed; and this would have been impossible but for a sudden accident. The landlady had been alarmed by the faint scream of the young woman ; had hurried from her private room to the girl's assistance; but at the foot of the stairs had been intercepted by the younger brother, and was at this moment struggling with him. The confusion of this life-and-death conflict had allowed man. the boy to whirl past them. Luckily he took a turn into a kitchen out of which was a back-door, fastened by a single bolt that ran freely at a touch; and through this door he rushed into the open fields. But at this moment the elder brother was set free for pursuit by the death of the poor girl. There is no doubt that in her delirium the image moving through her thoughts was that of the club, which met once a-week. She fancied it no doubt sitting; and to this room, for help and for safety, she staggered along; she entered it, and within the doorway once more she dropped down and instantly expired. Her murderer, who had followed her closely, now saw himself set at liberty for the pursuit of the boy. At this critical moment all was at stake; unless the boy were caught the enterprise was ruined. He passed his brother, therefore, and the landlady, without pausing, and rushed through the open door into the fields. By a single second perhaps, he was too late. The boy was keenly aware that, if he continued in sight, he would have no chance of escaping from a powerful young He made, therefore, at once for a ditch; into which he tumbled headlong. Had the murderer ventured to make a leisurely examination of the nearest ditch, he would easily have found the boy made so conspicuous by his white shirt. But he lost all heart, upon failing at once to arrest the boy's flight. And every succeeding second made his despair the greater. If the boy had really effected his escape to the neighbouring farm-houses, a party of men might be gathered within five minutes; and already it might have become difficult for himself and his brother, unacquainted with the field paths, to evade being intercepted. Nothing remained, therefore, but to summon his brother away. Thus it happened that the landlady, though mangled, escaped with life, and eventually recovered. The landlord owed his safety to the stupefying potion. And the baffled murderers had the misery of knowing that their dreadful crime had been altogether profitless. The road, indeed, was now open to the club-room; and, probably, forty seconds would have sufficed to carry off the box of treasure, which afterwards might have been burst open and pillaged at leisure. But the fear of intercepting enemies was too strongly upon them; and they fled rapidly by a road which carried them actually within six feet of the lurking boy. That night they passed through Manchester. When daylight returned, they slept in a thicket twenty miles distant from the scene of their guilty attempt. On the second and third nights, they pursued their march on foot, resting again during the day. About sunrise on the fourth morning they were entering some village near Kirby Lonsdale, in Westmorland. They must have designedly quitted the direct line of route; for their object was Ayrshire, of which county they were natives, and the regular road would have led them through Shap, Penrith, Carlisle. Probably they were seeking to elude the persecution of the stagecoaches, which, for the last thirty hours, had been scattering at all the inns and road-side cabarets hand-bills describing their persons and dress. It happened (perhaps through design) that on this fourth morning they had separated, so as to enter the village ten minutes apart from each other. They were exhausted and footsore. In this condition it was easy to stop them. A blacksmith had silently reconnoitred them, and compared their appearance with the descriptions of the hand-bills. They were then easily overtaken, and separately arrested. Their trial and condemnation speedily followed at Lancaster; and in those days it followed, of course, that they were executed. Otherwise, their case fell so far within the sheltering limits of what would now be regarded as extenuating circumstances that, whilst a murder more or less was not to repel them from their object, very evidently they were anxious to economise the bloodshed as much as possible. Immeasurable, therefore, was the interval which divided them from the monster Williams.1 They perished on the scaffold : Williams, as I have said, 1 While De Quincey has told the story of the M'Kean murder in such detail, he has left it undated. The criminals, however, were two brothers, Alexander and Michael Mackean (spelt also M'Keand), who were tried and condemned at Lancaster on the 18th of August 1826 for the murder, on the preceding 22d of May, of Elizabeth Bates, servant to Joseph Blears, keeper of a public-house at Winton, near Manchester. Though only this servant had been actually murdered, Blears himself had been drugged, his wife nearly murdered, and a boy in the house (Michael Higgins) chased for his life, much in the manner described by De Quincey.--M. by his own hand; and, in obedience to the law as it then stood, he was buried in the centre of a quadrivium, or conflux of four roads (in this case four streets), with a stake driven through his heart. And over him drives for ever the uproar of unresting London ! ፡፡ [The following appeared among the "Explanatory Notices" prefixed to the volume of De Quincey's Collected Writings which contained his completed revision of Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts:-"The paper on 'Murder as one of the Fine Arts' seemed to "exact from me some account of Williams, the dreadful London "murderer of the last generation,-not only because the amateurs had so much insisted on his merit as the supreme of artists for grandeur "of design and breadth of style, and because, apart from this momentary connexion with my paper, the man himself merited a "record for his matchless audacity, combined with so much of snaky subtlety and even insinuating amiableness in his demeanour,—but "also because, apart from the man himself, the works of the man (those two of them especially which so profoundly impressed the "nation in 1812) were in themselves, for dramatic effect, the most impressive on record. Southey pronounced their pre-eminence "when he said to me that they ranked amongst the few domestic " events which, by the depth and expansion of horror attending them, "had risen to the dignity of a national interest. I may add that "this interest benefited also by the mystery which invested the murders; mystery as to various points, but especially as respected one important question, Had the murderer any accomplice ?1 There was, therefore, reason enough, both in the man's hellish character "and in the mystery which surrounded him, for this Postscript to the original paper; since, in the lapse of forty-two years, both the man and his deeds had faded away from the knowledge of the present generation. But still I am sensible that my record is far too diffuse. Feeling this at the very time of writing, I was yet unable to correct "it; so little self-control was I able to exercise under the afflicting agita"tions and the unconquerable impatience of my nervous malady."] 66 66 66 1 Upon a large overbalance of probabilities, it was, however, definitively agreed amongst amateurs that Williams must have been alone in these atrocities. Meantime, amongst the colourable presumptions on the other side was this:-Some hours after the last murder, a man was apprehended at Barnet (the first stage from London on a principal north road), encumbered with a quantity of plate. How he came by it, or whither he was going, he steadfastly refused to say. In the daily journals, which he was allowed to see, he read with eagerness the police examinations of Williams; and, on the same day which announced the catastrophe of Williams, he also committed suicide in his cell. EARLY MEMORIALS OF GRASMERE 1 SOON after my return to Oxford in 1807-8,2 I received a letter from Miss Wordsworth, asking for any subscriptions I might succeed in obtaining amongst my college friends in 1 Appeared originally, with the title Recollections of Grasmere, in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine for September 1839, as one of the series of articles which De Quincey had begun to contribute to that periodical in 1834 under the title of "Sketches of Life and Manners from the Autobiography of an English Opium-Eater," with the alternative title of "Lake Reminiscences from 1807 to 1830" for a portion of them. When De Quincey reprinted the paper in 1854, in vol. ii of the Collective Edition of his Writings, it was under its new title of Early Memorials of Grasmere, but still as one of the series of his Autobiographic Sketches-with its place in that series altered, however, so as to make it the first of his papers of "Lake Reminiscences," preceding and introducing those on Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Southey. This arrangement was retained in Messrs. Black's sixteen-volume reissue of the Collective Writings. But, though thus originally interjected into the series of De Quincey's Autobiographic Sketches, the paper is really independent, and quite different in kind from the rest of that series. Accordingly, it is best presented by itself as a specimen of De Quincey's descriptive and narrative art in commemorating a tragic incident of real English life which happened in the Lake District about the time of his own first acquaintance with that district. The words 'Early Memorials of Grasmere," as the reader soon finds, do not mean "Memoirs of Grasmere in Early Times," or Antiquities of Grasmere," or anything of that kind. It is to De Quincey himself, as associated with Grasmere, that the word "Early" has reference; and A Tale of Grasmere when I first knew it would be a more exact title. -On comparing De Quincey's reprint of 1854 with the original in Tait's Magazine for September 1839, I have found that he bestowed great pains on the revision, and made considerable changes. These, I think, were all improvements.-M. 66 2 After one week of what he calls "delightful intercourse "" with the poet and the poet's admirable sister Dorothy Wordsworth, he had |