Horace Walpole calls this degenerate Shirley “a low wretch, a mad assassin, and a wild beast.”  He was, as my story will show, all this.  He was indeed an incarnate fiend.  But was he to blame?  He was possessed by devils; but they were devils of insanity.  The taint of madness was in his blood before he uttered his first cry in the cradle.  His uncle, whose coronet he was to wear, was an incurable madman.  His aunt, the Lady Barbara Shirley, spent years of her life shut up in an asylum.  And this hereditary taint shadowed Laurence Shirley’s life from his infancy, and ended it in tragedy.

As a boy, he was subject to violent attacks of rage, when it was not safe to approach him; and his madness grew with his years.  Strange tales are told of him as a young man.  We are told that he would spend hours pacing like a wild animal up and down his room, gnashing his teeth, clenching his fists, grinning diabolically, and uttering strange incoherent cries.  He would stand before a mirror, making horrible grimaces at his reflection, and spitting upon it; he walked about armed with pistols and dagger, ready at a moment to use both on any one who annoyed or opposed him; and in his disordered brain he nursed suspicion and hatred of all around him.

When he was little more than thirty, and some years after he had come into his earldom, he wooed and won the pretty daughter of Sir William Meredith; but before the honeymoon was ended he had begun to treat her with such gross brutality that, before she had long been a wife, she petitioned Parliament for a divorce, which set her free.  And as he was obviously quite unfit to administer his estates, it became necessary to appoint some one to receive his rents and control his revenue.

Such was the pitiful plight to which insanity had reduced Laurence, Earl Ferrers, while still little over the threshold of manhood; and these calamities only, and perhaps naturally, accentuated his madness.  He became more and more the terror of the neighbourhood in which he lived, and few had the courage to meet him when he took his solitary walks.

“I still retain,” writes a Mr Cradock in his “Memoirs,” “a strong impression of the unfortunate Earl Ferrers, who, with the Ladies Shirley, his sisters, frequented Leicester races, and visited at my father’s house.  During the early part of the day his lordship preserved the character of a polite scholar and a courteous nobleman, but in the evening he became the terror of the inhabitants; and I distinctly remember running upstairs to hide myself when an alarm was given that Lord Ferrers was coming armed, with a great mob after him.  He had behaved well at the ordinary; the races were then in the afternoon, and the ladies regularly attended the balls.  My father’s house was situated midway between Lord Ferrers’s lodgings and the Town Hall, where the race assemblies were then held.  He had, as was supposed, obtained liquor privately, and then became outrageous; for,