I pass in front of the little church a score of times in a month, and each time I look with gladness at its ugly front, content that it has replaced the walls within which was enacted that terrible tragedy of September, 1796. The family was straitened direfully in means, and in miserable case in many ways; the mother ailing helplessly, the father decaying rapidly in mind and body; the aged aunt, more of a burden than a help, despite the scanty board she paid; and the sister, suffering almost ceaselessly from attacks of her congenital gloom, submitting to the constant toil of her household duties, of her dressmaking, and of nursing her parents. Early in 1796 Charles wrote to Coleridge: “My life has been somewhat diversified of late. The six weeks that finished last year and began this, your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a mad-house at Hoxton. I am got somewhat rational now, and don’t bite any one. But mad I was!” This was his only attack; there was no more such agreeable diversity in his life, and he was cured by the most heroic of remedies. In the _London Times_ of Monday, September 26, 1796--in which issue the editors “exult in the isolation and cutting off” of the various armies of the French Republic in Germany, and doubt the “alleged successes of the army in Italy reported to the Directory by General Buonaparte;” in which the Right Honourable John, Earl of Chatham, is named Lord President of His Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council; and in which “Mr. Knowles, nephew and pupil of the late Mr. Sheridan,” advertises that he has “opened an English, French, and Latin preparatory school for a limited number of young gentlemen at No. 15 Brompton Crescent”--in this journal appeared the following: “On Friday afternoon, the coroner and a jury sat on the body of a lady in the neighbourhood of Holborn, who died in consequence of a wound from her daughter the preceding day. It appeared, by the evidence adduced, that, while the family were preparing for dinner, the young lady seized a case-knife lying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little girl, her apprentice, around the room. On the calls of her infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first object, and with loud shrieks, approached her parent. The child, by her cries, quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but too late. The dreadful scene presented to him the mother lifeless, pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing over her with the fatal knife, and the old man, her father, weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from the effects of a severe blow he had received from one of the forks she had been madly hurling about the room. “For a few days prior to this, the family had observed some symptoms of insanity in her, which had so much increased on the Wednesday evening that her brother, early the next morning, went to Dr. Pitcairn: but that gentleman was not at home.