human vice and fully are here wonderfully illustrated. We have only to turn to a single shelf of law reports to find tersely and graphically recorded the outline of countless tragedies and comedies, which no effort of the imagination could equal, and which prove over and over again the veracity of the old adage that "truth is stranger than fiction." Could we invest with life these puppets of the past, who have played their parts in the melodrama of life, and have left behind them these brief records of their happiness and misery, their frailties and foibles, we should have no need to justify ourselves for speaking of the "Romance of the Law Reports." Any single volume of the State Trials will be found to contain horrors that will put the most sensational of Miss Braddon's productions to shame. Again, the vicissitudes of fortune are much better drawn in the law reports than in the whole literature of the imagination. In fact, there is no possible combination of circumstances for which some parallel cannot here be found. Further, the law reports are the truest and most faithful commentary upon the history of the nation; and as the history of one epoch passes into the romance of the next, and the nursery legend of the third, so here we can find the germ of many a story which has long been regarded as the effect of imaginative genius.
There has seldom, if ever, been a more thrilling story than that of the abduction of Miss Turner. It has already served as material for many novelists; but the bare outline of the facts, as recorded in the reports, is sufficiently interesting. To follow the account given by Townsend, Ellen Turner, the daughter and heiress of William Turner, Esq., a gentleman of large landed property, residing at Shrigley Park, Cheshire, when fifteen years old, and while still at school at Liverpool, attracted the attention of Mr. Gibbons Wakefield. Having acquainted himself with the facts as to her fortune and expectations, he formed the design of carrying her off and marrying her after the approved fashion of Vanbrugh's or Wycherley's comedies. Not a little ingenuity was exercised in carrying the plot into execution. A French servant was sent with an empty carriage and a letter to the schoolmistress announcing the dangerous illness of Mrs. Turner, and begging that the young lady would return at once. The ruse was perfectly successful. Miss Daulby, the schoolmistress, hastened her pupil's departure, and she was driven to Manchester; here Mr. Gibbons Wakefield introduced himself, and told the young lady a plausible story to the effect that her mother's health was a mere pretext, and that the real reason for her journey was her father's pecuniary difficulties. Since Mr. Turner had made his fortune in commerce, and a mercantile crisis had only very lately been weathered, this story found ready credence with Miss Turner, who anxiously and willingly set out in a post-chaise to join her father, as she was told to do. Gibbons Wakefield was now joined by his brother William. The party posted by a roundabout route through Yorkshire to Kendal, and thence to Carlisle, the two brothers making good use of their time in convincing Miss Turner that her father's affairs were in the greatest confusion, and that his only hope lay in the good offices of an uncle of theirs, who would advance him £60,000. Further, a letter was read purporting to come from Mr. Grimsditch, the Turners' family solicitor, and advising her immediate marriage with Gibbons Wakefield. Probably no heroine of fiction, not even Clarissa Harlowe, Miss Byrom, or Miss Allworthy, was placed in a more peculiar situation. To Miss Turner the horror and anxiety of her position were, of course, as real as if there had been no conspiracy. With a heroism which has seldom been equalled, she agreed, on finding that her father could not meet her at Carlisle, to go over the border to join him. When arrived in Scotland, in the hope that she might thereby save the family fortunes, she gave her hand in marriage to Gibbons Wakefield, in the presence of a drunken blacksmith, the
