Cobden or Cardinal Wiseman or some other more recent celebrity. Then, again, all literature was full of Horrors; and, though we should have been deprived of jam at tea if we had been caught reading a Murder Trial in the _Daily Telegraph_, we were encouraged to drink our fill of Shakespeare and Scott and Dickens and other great masters of the Horrible. From De Quincey we learned that Murder may be regarded as a Fine Art, and from an anonymous poet we acquired the immortal verse which narrates the latter end of Mr. William Weare. Shakespeare, as his French critics often remind us, reeks of blood and slaughter; the word "Murder" and its derivatives occupy two columns of Mrs. Cowden Clarke's closely-printed pages. Scott's absolute mastery over his art is nowhere more strikingly exemplified than in his use of murderous mechanisms. "The Heart of Midlothian" begins, continues, and ends with murder. "Rob Roy" contains a murder-scene of lurid beauty. The murderous attack on the bridegroom in "The Bride of Lammermoor" is a haunting horror. Not all the Dryasdusts in England and Germany combined will ever displace the tradition of Amy Robsart and the concealed trap-door. Front-de-Boeuf's dying agony is to this hour a glimpse of hell. Greatest of the great in humour, Dickens fell not far behind the greatest when he turned his hand to Horrors. One sheds few tears for Mr. Tulkinghorn, and we consign Jonas Chuzzlewit to the gallows without a pang. But is there in fiction a more thrilling scene than the arrest of the murderer on the moonlit tower-stair in "Barnaby Rudge," or the grim escape of Sikes from the vengeance of the mob in "Oliver Twist"? For deliberate, minute, and elaborated horror commend me to the scene at the limekiln on the marshes where Pip awaits his horrible fate at the hands of the crazy savage Dolge Orlick. But it was not only the great masters of fiction who supplied us with our luxuries of horror. The picture of the young man who had murdered his brother, hanging on a gibbet in Blackgrove Wood, is painted with a gruesome fidelity of detail which places Mrs. Sherwood high among literary artists; and the incidents connected with the death of Old Prue would entitle Mrs. Beecher Stowe to claim kinship with Zola. It is curious to reflect that Miss Braddon, the most cheerful and wholesome-minded of all living novelists, first won her fame by imagining the murderous possibilities of a well, and established it by that unrivalled mystification which confounds the murderer and the murdered in "Henry Dunbar." Nor will the younger generation of authoresses consent to be left behind in the race of Horrors. In old days we were well satisfied if we duly worked up to our predestined murder just before the end of the third volume. To-day Lady Ridley gives us, in the first chapter of "A Daughter of Jael," one of the most delicate and suggestive pieces of murder-writing which I, a confirmed lover of the horrible, can call to mind.