remote parts. When their forces and necessaries were ready, it was agreed in council to send Cordeilla with Llyr, lest the French should not be obedient to Llyr. And Aganippus commended the French, as they valued their souls, and at their peril, to be as obedient to Llyr and to his daughter as they would be to himself.

"When they had taken leave, they set off towards the isle of Britain; and against them came Maglon, Prince of Scotland, and Henwyn, Prince of Cornwall, with all their power, and fought gallantly and severely with them; but owing to the French being so numerous, it did not avail them, for they were put to flight, and pursued, and a multitude of them slain; and Llyr and his daughter subdued the island before the end of the year from one sea to another, and chased his two sons in-law away out of the island.

'And after the isle of Britain had been conquered by Llyr, a messenger came from France to inform Cordeilla of the death of Aganippus; and she took that very heavily to heart, and from thenceforth she preferred dwelling in the isle of Britain with her father, than return to France on her dowry. Whereupon, after they had reduced the island to them, they governed it for a long time in peace and quietness until Llyr died. And after his death, he was honourably buried in a temple which he had himself built in Caer Llyr, under the river Soram, to the honour of some god who was called Janus Bifrons. And upon the festival of that temple, all the craftsmen of the city used to come to honour it, and then they would begin every work that was to be taken in hand to the conclusion of the year.

'After the decease of Llyr, Cordeilla took the govern ment of the isle of Britain, and she managed it for five years in peace and tranquillity; and in the sixth year rose her two nephews, sons of her sisters, who were young men of great fame-namely, Margan, the son of Maglon, Prince of Scotland; and Cunedda, the son of Henwyn, Prince of Cornwall. And they assembled an army, and made war on Cordeilla; and after frequent conflicts

between them, they subdued the island, and took her and confined her in prison. And when she thought of her former grandeur which she had lost, and there remained no hopes that she should be again restored, out of excessive anguish she killed herself, which was done by stabbing herself with a knife under her breast, so that she lost her soul. And thereupon it was adjudged that it was the foulest death of any for a person to kill himself. This happened a thousand and five hundred years after the deluge.'

TALE OF EUGENE ARAM.

In the year 1758, a man digging for limestone, near a place called St Robert's Cave, in the parish of Knaresborough, county of York, found the bones of a human body. Suspecting these to be the remains of some one who had been murdered, he gave information of his discovery in the town of Knaresborough, where the people, thrown into great excitement by the intelligence, endeavoured to recollect if any one had of late years been missed from that neighbourhood. It was remembered by a particular individual, that one Daniel Clarke, a shoemaker, had disappeared about thirteen years before, and had never again been heard of. On further inquiry, it was ascertained that he had disappeared under circumstances which occasioned a suspicion of his having acted fraudulently. He had borrowed a considerable quantity of plate, under pretence of being commissioned to collect that article for exportation. Being then just married, he had also borrowed some articles of household furniture and wearing apparel, for the purpose, as he pretended, of giving an entertainment to his friends. After his disappearance, two persons, named Houseman and Aram, were suspected of having aided him in the fraud. Their houses were searched, and some of the miscellaneous articles

found, but no plate, which it was then supposed that Clarke must have made off with; and thus the matter ended. It was now recollected that the wife of Aram, who was subsequently deserted by him, had said to some one that she knew what would peril the life of her husband, and of some other persons. An inquest being held upon the skeleton, all these circumstances were brought forward as evidence.

To this inquest the coroner summoned Richard Houseman, one of the individuals suspected at the time of having assisted Clarke in his fraud. This man entered the room in a state of great agitation, and with strong marks of fear in his countenance and voice. Taking up one of the bones, he used the remarkable expression: 'This is no more Dan Clarke's bone than it is mine;' which convinced the jury that he knew something more about the matter. He was ultimately prevailed on to acknowledge that he was privy to the murder of Clarke, and that his bones were buried in St Robert's Cave, not far from the place where those now before the jury had been found. On a search being made, the bones were found exactly in the place and posture which he described. He stated the actual murderer to be his former friend Eugene Aram, who now acted as usher in the school of Lynn, in Norfolk. A warrant was immediately sent off for the apprehension of Aram, who was found peacefully engaged in his ordinary business. The profession of this man, his mature age, and the reputation which he bore for great learning, conspired to render his apprehension as a murderer a matter of the greatest surprise to the inhabitants of the place where he lived. He at first denied that he had ever been at Knaresborough, or knew Daniel Clarke; but, on the introduction of a person who was acquainted with him at that town, he saw fit to acknowledge his former residence in it.

Eugene Aram was a native of Yorkshire, and connected by birth with some of the families of gentry in that county. The circumstances of his parents are not

stated, but he appears to have entered life in the character of a poor scholar. Having adopted the business of teaching, he devoted himself to the acquisition of knowledge with an ardour equalling that of the most distinguished scholars. After acting as an usher in various situations, he had settled, in 1734, at Knaresborough, where, eleven years after, he committed the crime for which he was now apprehended. By an early and imprudent marriage, he had added to the embarrassment of his circumstances; yet his pursuit of knowledge continued unabated. When we learn that the man who associated with such low persons as Clarke and Houseman, was deeply skilled in the ancient and modern languages, including the Hebrew, Arabic, and Celtic; and was alike conversant in the belles-lettres, in antiquities, and in several branches of modern science, our wonder amounts almost to disbelief; yet there can be no doubt of the fact. He had even, before his apprehension, advanced a great way in a comparative polyglot lexicon, upon a new, and, for that age, profound plan; in which it seems not unlikely that, if it had been carried into effect, he might have anticipated some of the honours of the German philologists. He had also composed several tracts upon British antiquities. In a fiction grounded upon his story, by one of the most delightful of modern novelists, his thirst for knowledge is seized with admirable art as a means of palliating his crime: he is there represented as entering into the base plans of his accomplices, for the purpose of supplying the means of study. But no such motive can be traced in his real story, which simply sets him down as a remarkable example of capacity and talent, degraded and lost through moral infirmity. Yet, even while we execrate the atrocious guilt of Aram, such is the homage we naturally yield to intellectual superiority, such the sympathy we accord to the painful struggles of a mind devoted to knowledge, that he has never been reckoned one of the herd of ordinary criminals. In Caulfield's Portraits, there is a genuine likeness of this singular man-an intellectual

but melancholy countenance, forming a touching commentary on his history.

At the trial of Aram, which took place before the York Assizes, on the 3d of August 1759, Richard Houseman was admitted as king's evidence, and gave a minute narration of the murder, slightly distorted, it was supposed, in order to lighten his own share of blame. According to the witness, Clarke had received his wife's fortune, amounting to L.160, on the night before he was murdered. He called at Aram's with this sum in his pocket, and also carrying the plate which he had obtained among his friends. He and Houseman, at the request of Aram, walked out in the direction of St Robert's Cave, where the party had no sooner arrived, than Aram knocked down Clarke and murdered him. Houseman, according to his own account, then retired; but it afterwards appeared that he had assisted in burying the body in the cave. The clothes of the murdered man were brought to Aram's house and burnt, but not without betraying the secret to Mrs Aram. After this, and other evidence had been given, Aram delivered a written defence, in which he endeavoured, by the exercise of much ingenuity and a show of curious learning, to make up for the want of living exculpatory evidence.

'First, my lord, the whole tenor of my conduct in life contradicts every particular of this indictment; yet I had never said this, did not my present circumstances extort it from me, and seem to make it necessary. Permit me here, my lord, to call upon malignity itself, so long and cruelly busied in this prosecution, to charge upon me any immorality, of which prejudice was not the author. No, my lord, I concerted no schemes of fraud, projected no violence, injured no man's person or property. My days were honestly laborious, my nights intensely studious; and I humbly conceive my notice of this, especially at this time, will not be thought impertinent or unseasonable, but at least deserving some attention: because, my lord, that any person, after a temperate use of life, a series of thinking and acting regularly, and without one