in the Dictionary of National Biography, observes, “Apart from her [Mary Blandy’s] statement there was nothing to connect him with the murder.”  These writers seem to have overlooked the following important facts:—­The letter written by Cranstoun to Mary, read by Bathurst in his opening speech, the terms of which plainly prove the writer’s complicity; and the packet rescued from the fire, bearing in his autograph the words, “The powder to clean the pebbles with,” which, when we remember the nature of its contents, leaves small doubt of the sender’s guilt.  “A supposition,” says Mr. Bleackley, “that does not explain [these] two damning circumstances must be baseless.”  The nocturnal manifestations experienced by Cranstoun, and interpreted by his friend Mrs. Morgan as presaging Mr. Blandy’s death, must also be explained.  Further, it would be interesting to know how the defenders of Cranstoun account for the warning given him by Mary in the intercepted letter—­“Lest any accident should happen to your letters, take care what you write.”  That this was part of a subtle scheme to inculpate her lover will, in the circumstances, hardly be maintained.  As Mr. Andrew Lang once remarked of a hypothesis equally untenable, “That cock won’t fight.”  Would Cranstoun have fled as he did from justice, and gone into voluntary exile for life, when, if innocent, he had only to produce Mary’s letters to him in proof of the blameless character of their correspondence? and why, when on his death those letters passed into Lord Cranstoun’s custody, did not that nobleman publish them in vindication of his brother’s honour, as he was directly challenged to do by a pamphleteer of the day?  The Crown authorities, at any rate, as we have seen, did not share the opinion expressed by the writers above cited; and from what was said by Mr. Justice Buller, in the case of George Barrington (Mich. 30 Geo. III., reported Term Rep. 499), it appears that Cranstoun, for his concern in the murder of Mr. Blandy, was prosecuted to outlawry, the learned judge observing with reference to the form adopted on that occasion, “It was natural to suppose groat care had been taken in settling it, because some of the most eminent gentlemen in the profession were employed in it.”

  “Alas! the record of her page will tell
  That one thus madden’d, lov’d, and guilty fell. 
  Who hath not heard of Blandy’s fatal fame,
  Deplor’d her fate, and sorrow’d o’er her shame?”

Thus the author of Henley:  A Poem (Hickman & Stapledon, 1827); and, indeed, the frequent references to the case in the “literary remains” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries bear witness to the justice of that poetic observation.