"This afternoon, the coroner's 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. While the family were preparing dinner, the young lady, in a fit of insanity, seized a case-knife lying on the table, and in a menacing manner pursued a little girl, her apprentice, round the room. On the eager calls of her helpless, 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[6] of the house--but too late. The dreadful scene presented to him the mother lifeless on a chair; her daughter yet wildly standing over her with the fatal knife; and the venerable old man--her father--weeping by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from the effects of a blow he received from one of the forks she had been madly hurling about the room. But a few days prior to this, the family had discovered some symptoms of lunacy in her, which had so much increased on the Wednesday evening that her brother early the next morning went in quest of Dr. Pitcairn; had that gentleman been providentially met with, the fatal catastrophe had, probably, been prevented. She had once before, in the earlier part of her life, been deranged from the harassing fatigues of too much business. As her carriage towards her mother had been ever affectionate in the extreme, it is believed that to her increased attentiveness to her is to be ascribed the loss of her reason at this time. The jury, without hesitation, brought in their verdict--Lunacy." [6] This appears to be a mistake. It was Charles himself who performed the sad duty of overpowering his sister. From the fatal hour when Mary lifted her hand against her mother, to the last of his life, Charles Lamb was heroic in his self-denying devotion to her. As a matter of course, she had to be, for the time being, placed under restraint. But Charles then and there, in his noble love and sense of duty, determined that, abandoning all other loves and hopes which might interfere with his one great, self-imposed purpose, his life should be devoted to the welfare and care of his sister. A few days after the occurrence, he wrote to his friend Coleridge:--