It was generally believed, as he promised to make a more ample confession on the day he was executed of every thing prior to the murder, that the whole would have been disclosed; but he put an end to any farther discovery, by an attempt upon his own life. When he was called from his bed to have his chains taken off, he refused, alleging that he was very weak. On moving him, it was found that he had inflicted a severe wound upon his arm, from which the blood was flowing copiously. He had concealed a razor in the condemned hold some time before. By proper and prompt applications he was brought to himself, and though weak from loss of blood, conducted to Tyburn in York, where, being asked if he had any thing to say, he answered, “No.” He was then executed, and his body conveyed to Knaresborough Forest, and hung in chains, pursuant to his sentence. That Eugene Aram murdered Clark is beyond all question, since we have his confession; that he committed the murder actuated by the cause he alleges, is open to great suspicion. The strange solicitude which all men, even the most vicious, manifest to leave behind a memory mingled with some little good, prompted him, doubtless, to give his crime the ennobling, or, at least, mitigatory motive to which he attributes it. Whether the perpetration of a murder can be justified, even urged by the wrong Aram states himself to have suspected, may be left to the consideration of the casuist; but whether the dreadful act can be extenuated by as deliberate and foul attack on the virtue and character of an innocent and industrious woman, whom he upon all occasions treated with infamous barbarity, is a question we can confidently leave to the judgment and moral sense of every man. That Eugene Aram was leagued with Clark and Houseman in their fraud at Knaresborough, there can be little doubt; that he plundered his unhappy victim after he had murdered him, there can be less; that no sense of domestic injury would urge a man to rob another who had wronged him after he had slain him, needs only to be mentioned to be admitted; and therefore, believing conscientiously from these facts that the charge against his wife was not maintainable, a double indignation is entailed upon the wretch who could add to the measure of his crime this gratuitous calumny. Notwithstanding these facts and the inferences that every attentive reader must inevitably draw from them, Eugene Aram has been deemed a fit hero for a popular novel; and the execration with which he should have been consigned to posterity has been attempted to be converted into a sentimental commiseration for a gentle student who beats out his friend’s brains on philosophical principles, and converts his property to his own use purely with a view to the interests of science and the intellectual progression of the world at large. FOOTNOTES: