gentlemen, do not mistake me; it was not I that did it.  I have not the vanity to think myself equal to any such achievement; be assured that you greatly overrate my poor talents; Mrs. Ruscombe’s affair was far beyond my slender abilities.  But I came to know who the artist was, from a celebrated surgeon, who assisted at his dissection.  This gentleman had a private museum in the way of his profession, one corner of which was occupied by a cast from a man of remarkably fine proportions.

“That,” said the surgeon, “is a cast from the celebrated Lancashire highwayman, who concealed his profession for some time from his neighbors, by drawing woollen stockings over his horse’s legs, and in that way muffling the clatter which he must else have made in riding up a flagged alley that led to his stable.  At the time of his execution for highway robbery, I was studying under Cruickshank:  and the man’s figure was so uncommonly fine, that no money or exertion was spared to get into possession of him with the least possible delay.  By the connivance of the under-sheriff he was cut down within the legal time, and instantly put into a chaise and four; so that, when he reached Cruickshank’s he was positively not dead.  Mr. ——­, a young student at that time, had the honor of giving him the coup de grace, and finishing the sentence of the law.”  This remarkable anecdote, which seemed to imply that all the gentlemen in the dissecting-room were amateurs of our class, struck me a good deal; and I was repeating it one day to a Lancashire lady, who thereupon informed me, that she had herself lived in the neighborhood of that highwayman, and well remembered two circumstances, which combined, in the opinion of all his neighbors, to fix upon him the credit of Mrs. Ruscombe’s affair.  One was, the fact of his absence for a whole fortnight at the period of that murder:  the other, that, within a very little time after, the neighborhood of this highwayman was deluged with dollars:  now Mrs. Ruscombe was known to have hoarded about two thousand of that coin.  Be the artist, however, who he might, the affair remains a durable monument of his genius; for such was the impression of awe, and the sense of power left behind, by the strength of conception manifested in this murder, that no tenant (as I was told in 1810) had been found up to that time for Mrs. Ruscombe’s house.

But, whilst I thus eulogize the Ruscombian case, let me not be supposed to overlook the many other specimens of extraordinary merit spread over the face of this century.  Such cases, indeed, as that of Miss Bland, or of Captain Donnellan, and Sir Theophilus Boughton, shall never have any countenance from me.  Fie on these dealers in poison, say I:  can they not keep to the old honest way of cutting throats, without introducing such abominable innovations from Italy?  I consider all these poisoning cases, compared with the legitimate style, as no better than wax-work by the side of sculpture, or a lithographic print by