And years have rotted off his flesh,- After the midnight interment scene in Woodstock, "Methinks the very night winds among the leaves," says Joceline, "will tell of what we have been doing-methinks the very trees themselves will say, 'there is a dead corpse lies among our roots.' Witnesses are soon found when blood hath been spilled." And readers of Scott may call to mind how the hero of another of his stories is set a-musing on the mysterious tales on record of the mode of discovery of strange deeds of bloodthe discovery and the avenging: how animals, irrational animals, had told the secret, and birds of the air had carried the matter how the elements had seemed to betray the deed which had polluted them-how earth had ceased to support the murderer's steps, fire to warm his frozen limbs, water to refresh his parched lips, air to relieve his gasping lungs : how all, in short, bore evidence to the homicide's guilt; while, in other circumstances, the criminal's own awakened conscience pursued and brought him to justice, and in some narratives the grave was said to have yawned, that the ghost of the sufferer might call for revenge.1 1 Lord Eldon was fond of reciting instances of "Murder will out." In one case where he was counsel, the evidence did not, for a long while, appear to touch the prisoner at all, and the man looked about him with the most perfect unconcern, seeming to think himself quite safe. "At last the surgeon was called, who stated deceased had been killed by a shot, a gunshot, in the head, and he produced the matted hair and stuff cut from and taken out of the wound. It was all hardened with blood. A basin of warm water was brought into court, and, as the blood was gradually softened, a piece of printed paper appeared, the wadding of the gun, which proved to be the half of a ballad. The other half had been found in the man's pocket when he was taken. He was hanged." Here again is a passage of recorded dialogue between the old judge and his niece, Miss Forster: "Ellen. I have always thought it very extraordinary, uncle, the discovery of murders many years after the deed had been committed. "Lord Eldon. Yes, very. I remember one man taken up twelve years after the deed. He had made his escape; and though every search was made, he could not be found. Twelve years afterwards, the brother of the murdered man was in Liverpool in a public house. He fell asleep, and was awoke by some one picking his pocket: he started, exclaiming, with an adiuration,-'the man that killed my brother twelve years ago!' Hesperus, in the Brides' Tragedy, moots the hypothesis: "Yet say it were so, I but say suppose, That I had foully slain some kindred creature; From this outside, and show a hand as clean Attendant. You might, Till heaven's justice blasted you, be hid.” The plain answer of a plain man, no way disposed to share Mr. Thackeray's scepticism, as expressed in one of the Roundabout Papers, where, in no roundabout way, he says, (on the subject of Being Found Out,)-"They talk of murderers being pretty certainly found out. Psha! I have heard an authority awfully competent vow and declare that scores and hundreds of murders are committed, and nobody is the wiser. That terrible man mentioned one or two ways of committing murder, which he maintained were quite common, and were scarcely ever found out." More in consonance with the prepossessions, not to say prejudices, of the sensus communis, is what the old playwright, John Webster, makes Bosola exclaim: "Other sins only speak; murder shrieks out : The element of water moistens the earth, But blood flies upwards and bedews the heavens."1 He Assistance came to him: the man was secured, tried, and condemned. had enlisted as a soldier and gone to India, immediately after the deed was committed; and he had just landed at Liverpool on his return, where his first act was to pick the pocket of the brother of the man he had murdered twelve years before. It was very extraordinary that the man waking out of sleep should so instantly know him."-Twiss's Life of Lord Chancellor Eldon. 1 Compare what passes between guilty agent and guilty employer in the same scene : "Bosola. Who shall dare to reveal this? Oh, I'll tell thee! The wolf shall find her grave and scrape it up, The horrid murder." H PRESENCE AND CORRESPONDENCE. 2 JOHN 12; 3 JOHN 13, 14. AVING many things to write unto the elect lady and her children, whom he loved in the truth, the elder -as he wills to call himself-willed not to write with paper and ink; but trusted to come in person and speak face to face, or mouth to mouth, that their joy might be full. So again to the well beloved Gaius writes the same elder, in quite the same spirit, and almost the same words: "I had many things to write, but I will not with ink and pen write unto thee; but I trust I shall shortly see thee, and we shall speak face to face." Joy there might be, and must be, in receiving a letter from a penman such as this. But for the fulness of joy there must be his personal presence; and in person he trusted to be with his correspondents soon, and to prove what a different meaning "face to face" has from pen, ink, and paper; that in realizing the depth of that difference their joy might be full. It has been said that for anything like real friendship there must at one period have been constant and free conversation. "Letters are all very well"; and the correspondence of close friends is a comparative good in default of a positive better; but a shrewd as well as genial authority owns to having not much faith in that friendship which is content with letters, and does not make constant efforts for the more cordial and the closer encounter of hand and eye, of actual face to face. "Without this there may be kind feeling and preference; but warmth is wanting, and warmth is essential to friendship." Schleiermacher dilates on the grave difference between the effect produced upon him by a letter and that by a conversation. "How often," he writes to one pretty constant correspondent, "have I not gone to work immediately after deeply interesting conversations with you"; but "after the receipt of a letter, even of the most delightful letter, imagination and aspiration require more time for the exercise of their functions." It seems he had to "take in leisurely the contents of a letter."1 1 On this account he might perhaps have been unable to adopt Horace Those were not penny post days, much less halfpenny post-card days; and the world did not live quite so fast as now, though it was quickening its pace and its postal service from the rate commemorated in The Doctor's memoir of Leonard and Margaret, when there was as yet no mail coach to waft a sigh across the country at the rate of eight miles an hour. Letters came slowly and with long intervals between; but when they came, the happiness which they imparted to Leonard and Margaret lasted during the interval, however long." To Leonard it was an exhilarant and a cordial which rejoiced and strengthened him he is described as treading the earth with a lighter and more elated movement on the day when he received a letter from Margaret; while to her his letters were like summer dew upon the herb that thirsts for such refreshBound for Rome, Leonatus bids Imogen ment. And with mine eyes I 'll drink the words you send, Though ink be made of gall." And when Imogen in Britain receives a letter from Leonatus at Rome, she turns from thinking on the grief of being sundered to this parenthesis of solace : "Some griefs are med'cinable; this is one of them, And how greets hearty old Menenius Agrippa a letter from Caius Marcius? In his heartiest way. "A letter for me? It gives me an estate of seven years' health, in which time I will make a lip at the physician: the most sovereign prescription in Galen is but empiricutic, and to this preservative of no Walpole's style when he tells his faithful Florentine correspondent: “I am angry at your thinking that I can dislike to receive two or three of your letters at once. Do you take me for a child, and imagine that, though I like one plum tart, two may make me sick?" Walpole was used to receive the like compliments from others; and it was not mere compliment on the part of Richard West, when he, for instance, asked: "Do you never write folios as well as quartos? You know I am a helluo of everything of that kind, and I am never so happy as when verbosa et grandis epistola venit." "Your letter, like the scriptural oil, has made my face to shine," writes John Sterling to Thomas Carlyle. better report than a horse-drench." But Shakspeare must not tempt us further in illustrations of the value set by a warm heart on a kind letter, failing the grasp of the living hand that wrote it. It was a mere whim, a sheer freak of fancy, that made Madame de Staël and her guests at the farm called Fossé sit round a table after dinner, and write letters to each other instead of conversing. These varied and multiplied communiqués, by her account, intererested them so much, that they, great conversers though they were—some of them, if not all—were impatient to stop the after dinner talk in order to begin the written correspondence. "When any stranger came in we could not bear the interruption of our habits; and our penny post always went its round." Did none of them sometimes feel what the Duchess of Queensberry felt in writing to Swift: "Though I have a sensible satisfaction by conversing with you in this way, yet I love mightily to look in the person's face I am speaking to. By that one learns to stop when it is wished, or to mend what is said amiss"? Pope, again, writes to Swift: "If it be the least pleasure to you I will write once a week most gladly but can you abstract the letters from the person who writes them, so far as not to feel more vexation in the thought of our separation than satisfaction in the nothings he can express? If you can, really and from my heart I cannot." Moore writes to Byron : "I long to be near you, that I might know how you really look and feel; for these letters tell nothing, and one word, a quattr occhi, is worth whole reams of correspondence." And yet, as Landor's Boccaccio has it, . . frequent correspondence Retains the features, nay, brings back the voice; The very shoe creaks, when the letter opens." One of the most skilled and famous of letter writers, James Howell, of the Epistolæ Ho-Eliana, arguing that we should write as we speak, pronounces that to be a true familiar letter which expresses one's mind, " as if he were discoursing with the party to whom he writes in short and succinct terms." The tongue and the pen, he adds, are both interpreters of the mind, |