occurrences are more frequent than is commonly imagined, and valiantly protests against that "human pride and scepticism, and a reaction from the superstitions of a preceding age," which caused them to be concealed or denied, or explained away. In her polemics in favour of mesmerism, she scarcely does her spiriting gently.
The collection of stories published under the name of "Light and Darkness," comprises specimens of Mrs. Crowe’s manner in its "all and sundry" varieties. There is more darkness, indeed, than light; more of grave than gay; less of lively than severe. The book is beloved of those who relish a supper-full of horrors, and who find special entertainment in the simultaneous experience of the chimes of two in the morning ("not a mouse stirring," look you!), and the death-throes of a flickering lamp, and the alarms of a ghost-tale—all contributing to a shivering crisis of excitement, which sends the reader, with the perturbed gesture and dilated eyeball and stealthy tread of Queen Macbeth, "to bed—to bed—to bed!" Thus, "The Monk's Story" relates with "dreary" circumstantiality the uncomfortable mania of a somnambule for roving about o'nights, and sticking decent people in their first sleep; "The Surgeon’s Adventure" pleasantly sets forth the unpleasantries of Italian banditti, with their pastoral inns, and ragouts of the flesh stipulated for in Shylock’s bond; "The Lycanthropist," or wolf-man, who essays, with success fully equal to his merits, the part of the vampire; "The Bride's Journey," with its strange series of contretemps and narrow escapes; and "The Priest of St. Quentin," a romantic police report after the own heart of police report students. "The Poisoners" furnish similar matter, calculated to be highly welcome to "The Society of Connoisseurs in Murder," who, as their natural history and unnatural tastes are expounded in the English Opium-eater's memorable Lecture,[1] profess to be curious in homicide; amateurs and dilettanti in the various modes of bloodshed; and, in short, murder-fanciers, and who, whenever the police annals of Europe bring up a fresh atrocity of that class, meet and criticise it as they would a picture, statue, or other work of art. Then, again, Mrs. Crowe's knack in getting up a case of circumstantial evidence, and
- ↑ This Lecture is one of the cleverest and most characteristic of Mr. de Quincey's writings—replete with humorous irony, ingenious illustration, erudite gossip, and philosophic burlesque. The sustained gravity of the lecturer, and his keen zest in explaining a recondite beauty, are inimitably fine. To readers of this generation, lamentably unread in the periodical literature of five lustra since, we may be permitted to explain, that the jeu d’esprit in question expounds the æsthetics of Murder—methodically ranging from Cain to Mr. Thurtell—from barbarian ages, when the art was little understood, and distressing bungling disgraced the profession, to the present age, when masterpieces of excellence have been executed, and when, to quote the Lecturer himself, "people begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed—a knife—a purse—and a dark lane. Design, gentlemen,—design," continues this earnest and eloquent professor, "grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment, are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature. Mr. Williams has exalted the idea of Murder to all of us. … Like Æschylus or Milton in poetry, like Michael Angelo in painting, he hes carried his art to a point of colossal sublimity; and, as Mr. Wordsworth observes, has in a manner 'created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.'" The "as Mr. Wordsworth observes," is here delicious, all things considered, and must almost have ravished a smile from the poet himself. But to Wordsworth a sense of the ludicrous was as absolutely wanting, as the sense of smell.
