The above is one of the many letters that might be quoted to show the aggravating delays and difficulties under which so much of Leech's work was produced. I take Mr. Morgan to have been one of the officials of Mr. Richard Bentley's establishment, whose patience must have been sorely tried again and again by the pranks of that _genus irritabile_, the writer. Judging from the humorous character of Albert Smith's "Ledbury" and other works, one is hardly prepared for the horrors that make us shudder over the pages of "The Marchioness of Brinvilliers"--horrors in which the writer seems to revel with a zest as keen as that he takes in the fun and frolic of Ledbury. The "shilling shocker" of the present day is a mild production indeed, in comparison with the history of the poisoner and adulteress, Brinvilliers, in which "on horror's head horrors accumulate." The authors of the modern productions are, for the most part, inventors of the blood-and-murder scenes that adorn their books. Not so Mr. Albert Smith, whose pages describe but too truly the career of the most notorious of the many criminals that flourished in the most profligate period of French history. Louis XIV. set an example in debauchery to his subjects which the highest of them eagerly followed; but the most fearful factor of this terrible time was poison, by which the possessors of estates who "lagged superfluous on the scene" were made to give place to greedy heirs; husbands, inconveniently in the way, were put out of it by their wives, whose affections had been disposed of elsewhere; state officers, whose positions were desired by aspirants unwilling to wait for them, were struck by sudden and mysterious illness, speedily followed by death, for which the faculty of the time could in no way account. Marie, Marchioness of Brinvilliers, lived with her husband in the Rue des Cordeliers in Paris. The Marquis was a man of easy morals, and the Marchioness was a woman of still easier morals, for she had many lovers; she also amused her leisure hours by the study of the nature and properties of a great variety of deadly poisons; thinking, no doubt, as she was of a jealous disposition, that the time might arrive when her knowledge would be useful in depriving her lover of the temptation which had led him to forget his duty to her. The Marchioness was a very beautiful woman; she had eyes of a tender blue; her complexion was of dazzling whiteness, with cheeks of a delicate carnation; her expression was angelic, and she wore her hair of pale gold in bushy ringlets, in obedience to the fashion of the time. We first become acquainted with the Marchioness under painful circumstances, for she made--and kept--an appointment with one lover without being sufficiently careful to disguise her doings from another. That other was the Chevalier Gaudin de Sainte-Croix, who proceeded to the lodgings of his rival, M. Camille Theria.