the object of her former affection, but present hate?

The propriety of such a conclusion may be doubted.

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Eccentricity" is not insanity. Heaven help many of the most gifted of her Majesty's lieges -an ex-chancellor included-if it were. A man or a woman may say odd things, do odd things, repeat them, exult in them, and all the while be in his or her right mind. Besides, the prisoner's previous conduct, up to the moment of firing the fatal shot, gave no indication that she had lost all power of discriminating between right and wrong. What inquiries more calm and pertinent than hers, as detailed in the evidence of the witness Bailey?

But if a lunatic, who made her such?

Whose conduct was it that had unsettled reason in her seat? Whose treachery and desertion had mastered a mind already tottering under the weight of conscious and accumulated transgression? Whose broken faith had rendered her reckless, frantic, desperate? - Whose cruelty had quenched all gentle and womanly feelings within her, and left but one impulse behind?-a deep, burning, and passionate desire for revenge.

The result?

Sudden and unprepared death to one party: life-long confinement in a mad-house to the other.

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Life-long. Hope of amelioration or liberation there could be none. A recollection fraught with agony! Say, what is life without hope? "I am not altogether agreed," writes the poet Gray to Wharton, "as to your historical consolation in time of trouble. A calm melancholy it may produce-a stiller sort of despair (and that only in some circumstances, and on some constitutions); but I doubt no real comfort or content can ever arise in the human mind but from hope.

This balm, so far as earth was concerned, could never be hers again. Penitence might avail for the future, could not remedy the past. Her hands were stained with blood. She had deliberately deprived of existence one who had once been very dear to her, and sent him, all unprepared, it might be, to his dread account. And for herself-she was an inmate of a madhouse, surrounded by the insane, and for life!

Such-the bitter fruits of illicit attachments. Such-the frightful harvest reaped by those who indulge, not resist, the impulses of the hour. Such and so gloomy are the results which accrue from man's framing to himself a code of morality well adapted to his own lawless passions, but wholly opposed to the will of the Supreme; to the word of the Supreme; to the real happiness of the Individual, and the best interests of the Community.

CHAPTER XII.

THE FRAUDULENT MERCHANT.

Perrott, of Ludgate Hill.

"Many men do nothing else than make work for repentance, and yet do nothing less than repent of their work."

SOUTH.

It is an article of faith held firmly by many humane and kindly-disposed people, that poverty is the grand provocative of crime, and that if there were no want there would be little dishonesty. They quote, in support of their theory, sundry wise saws and time-tried proverbs. They exclaim, that "that it is hard to make an empty sack stand upright." They affirm that hunger is a teacher bound by no rules; and that want-pinching, and pressing, and perpetually present want-woefully dims a man's moral perceptions, and marvelously confuses him as to the precise relationship of meum and

tuum.

But if adversity be to some minds a season of special trial, prosperity is to others no less a touchstone.

Many propensities, during a period of depression or humiliation, slumber in a man's heart which prosperity rouses into action. The

natural and moral world closely assimilate. There is many a noxious weed which needs the full blaze of the sun to attain vigor and maturity. In the shade its growth would be sickly, and its duration short. So in the human heart there are unworthy aspirations and malignant tendencies, which, checked and repressed by the chilling influence of adversity, are rapidly developed and fully ripened in the sunny glow of prosperity.

This man

He had to For seven His annual

Perrott is an instance in point. had no temptation to dishonesty. complain of no want of success. years all went well with him. returns were about two thousand pounds, and we hear of no drawback and no disaster befalling him. Prosperity was his ruin. It developed the seeds of dishonesty which lay lurking in his heart. The TEMPTER assailed him and triumphed. The thriving man resolved to become rich instantly, unscrupulously, without industry, at the expense of others, and by the tortuous machinery of fraud.

Such was his scheme. How did he work it out?

JOHN PERROTT was born at Newport Pagnell, Bucks, in 1723. His parents died when he was very young, leaving him, at seven years of age, in possession of about 15007. This sum served to bestow the education suited to his rank of life, and subsequently to bind him as

apprentice to a relative in Hertfordshire. In his 24th year he came up to London, and commenced business as a mercer and general warehouseman in Blow-bladder-street. Thence, in 1752, he removed to Ludgate Hill, where he dealt in a variety of articles, styling himself merchant. For seven years he was remarkably punctual in his pecuniary transactions. Having thus established for himself a reputation, and finding that he could procure credit to any extent, he commenced his career of fraud by contracting for goods of various descriptions to the amount of £30,000, £25,000 of which he actually got into his possession. The next part of the scheme was to convert these goods into ready money, and for this purpose he employed an agent, Henry Thompson, who had long acted for him as his broker.

The method of dealing was sufficiently expeditious.

Thompson resided in a small house in Monkwell-street, near Wood-street, whither the goods were sent in the dusk of the evening, and where he invited some of the principal traders to look at them, as goods consigned to him from the places where they were manufactured. Perrott always set a price upon them, which Thompson showed to his customers, who usually fixed another price at which they would buy. At this price Thompson was always ordered to sell, though it was