mean you by enquiring?  I do not understand you,’” So quickly had the “smarts” of the new generation forgotten the “fair Blandy” of their fathers’ toasts.  To make an end of such quotations, which might indefinitely be multiplied, we shall only refer the reader to Lady Russell’s Three Generations of Fascinating Women (London:  1901), for good reading passim, and with special reference to her account of the interest taken in the case by Lady Ailesbury of Park Place, who “was related to the instigator of the crime,” and, believing in Mary’s innocence, used all her influence to obtain a pardon.  To Mr. Horace Bleackley’s brilliant study of the case we have already in the Preface referred.

It may, in closing, be worth while to remind the student of such matters that the year with which we have had so much concern was in other respects an important one in the annals of crime.  On 14th May, 1752, the “Red Fox,” Glenure, fell by an assassin’s bullet in the wood of Lettermore, which fact resulted in the hanging of a guiltless gentleman and, in after years, more happily inspired an immortal tale; while on 1st January, 1753, occurred the disappearance of Elizabeth Canning, that bewildering damsel whose mission it was to baffle her contemporaries and to set at nought the skill of subsequent inquirers.

Well, we have learned all that history and tradition has to tell us about Mary Blandy; but what do we really know of that sombre soul that sinned and suffered and passed to its appointed place so long ago?  A few “facts,” some “circumstances”—­which, if we may believe the dictum of Mr. Baron Legge, cannot lie; and yet she remains for us dark and inscrutable as in her portrait, where she sits calmly in her cell, preparing her false Account for the misleading of future generations.  Like her French “parallel,” Marie-Madeleine de Brinvilliers, like that other Madeleine of Scottish fame, she leaves us but a catalogue of ambiguous acts; her secret is still her own.  If only she had been the creature of some great novelist’s fancy, how intimately should we then have known all that is hidden from us now; imagine her made visible for us through the exquisite medium of Mr. Henry James’s incomparable art—­the subtle individual threads all cunningly combined, the pattern wondrously wrought, the colours delicately and exactly shaded, until, in the rich texture of the finished tapestry, the figure of the woman as she lived stood perfectly revealed.

Leading Dates In the Blandy Case.

1744.

  22 May—­Marriage of Cranstoun and Anne Murray.

1745.

  19 February—­Birth of their daughter.

1746.

  August—­Cranstoun meets Mary Blandy at Lord Mark Kerr’s.

  October—­Mrs. Cranstoun takes proceedings in Commissary Court.

1747.

  August—­Second meeting of Cranstoun and Mary.  Cranstoun visits the
      Blandys and stays six months.