much over the circumstances attending the
man's death, recollected that the deceased's
wife, then alive, and married to another person,
had been seen to go into her first husband's
chamber with a nail and hammer. Accordingly,
he went to a justice of the peace and told him
the story, together with his discovery of the
nail in the skull. The wife being sent for,
witnesses came forward, who testified to various
suspicious circumstances; and the woman,
being confounded by the discovery of her guilt,
confessed, and was hanged. It will be observed
that this incident took place during the life of
Shakespeare, and it may have suggested to him
that passage in Macbeth:

It will have blood; they say, blood will haveblood;
Stones have been known to move,and trees to speak:
Augurs, and understood relations, have
By magot-pies, and choughs, and rooks, brought forth
The secret'st man of blood.

Also, the very similar lines in Hamlet:

For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak
With most miraculous organ.

Equally remarkable was the discovery, during
the protectorate of Richard Cromwell, of the
murder of Mr. Fussell, by Major Strangeways—
a story which was related at full in
No. 182 of this Journal. The means of discovery
in that case was a gun which one of the jurymen
at the inquest had lent to the major, and
which he recognised by certain marks on seeing
it again. Here, also, the murderer confessed
his crime, on finding so strange and unexpected
a piece of evidence suddenly confronting
him. Mr. Timbs seems to have overlooked
this striking story, though in his account of
criminals pressed to death for not pleading, he
mentions Strangeways as having so suffered.
It appears that there are records of this atrocious
torture as late as the year 1770.

Of course Mr. Timbs tells the story of George
Barnwell and the fair and free Mrs. Millwood—
though there seems to be great doubt whether
the legend was originally a London legend at
all, the scene of the crime being laid by the old
ballad in Percy's Reliques at Ludlow, in Shropshire.
It was apparently Lillo, the writer of
the celebrated tragedy, who transferred the
locality to Camberwell and Shoreditch, and ever
since then the story has been identified with
the metropolis, though even in the ballad Barnwell
is spoken of as a London apprentice, who
committed his great crime far away in the
country. Some difference of opinion, however,
seems to exist among the various writers on the
subject as to which is the correct account, and
the period when Barnwell lived has been
referred to the reigns both of Queen Elizabeth
and Queen Anne. Though Lillo's play is now
seldom or never performed, it was customary,
even up to a recent date, to act it at Covent
Garden and Drury Lane on "Boxing Night"
and Easter Monday, as a moral lesson to the
young shopmen and apprentices who were
supposed to be present at the theatres in
strong force on those two occasions. Dr. Barrowby,
physician to St. Bartholomew's Hospital,
used to relate he was once sent for by a
young gentleman in Great St. Helen's, apprentice
to a merchant in a large way of business.
He was very ill. The nurse had observed that
he frequently sighed profoundly, and she told
the doctor she was sure that something lay
on his mind. Dr. Barrowby accordingly sent
every one out of the room, and earnestly
solicited the young man to inform him what
oppressed his mind so much, assuring him
tnat unless his spirits could be relieved, no
medicine could possibly do him any good. The
youth confessed that something did indeed lie
very heavy at his heart, but that he would
sooner die than divulge it, as it would be his
ruin if known. The doctor, however, by kindness
of manner, and protesting his desire to
serve, and not betray, his patient, persuaded him
to relate the circumstances which distressed him.
It appeared that he was the second son of a
gentleman of good fortune in Hertfordshire; that
he had got into an intrigue with the mistress of
the captain of an Indiaman then abroad; and had
misappropriated cash, drafts, and notes, to the
amount of two hundred pounds, belonging to
his employer; and that a few nights before, at
Drury Lane Theatre, he had been so moved by
the performance of Ross and Mrs. Pritchard in
the parts of George Barnwell and Mrs. Millwood,
that he had not had a moment's peace
since, and had wished to die, to avoid the
shame hanging over him. The kind-hearted
doctor, on hearing that the young man's
father had been written for, and was expected
every minute, bade his patient make himself
perfectly easy, as he would undertake that his
father should supply the money, or, if there
were any hesitation on the part of that gentleman,
that he, the doctor, would provide it himself.
The father shortly afterwards arrived, and,
on being privately informed of the cause of his
son's illness, said, with many thanks to the
doctor, that he would at once go to his banker's
and get the cash. On communicating this joyful
intelligence to the young fellow, the doctor
found that his pulse, without the administration
of any medicine, was greatly improved; he
rapidly recovered, and in subsequent years
became an eminent merchant. " Dr. Barrowby,"
continues Ross, writing to a friend, " never
told me the name, but the story he mentioned
in the green-room of Drury Lane Theatre;
and after telling it one night, when I was
standing by, he said to me: ' You have
done some good in your profession—more,
perhaps, than many a clergyman who preached
last Sunday;' for the patient told the doctor
that the play raised such horror and contrition
in his soul, that he would, if it would please
God to raise a friend to extricate him out of
that distress, dedicate the rest of his life to
religion and virtue. Though I never knew his
name, or saw him, to my knowledge, I had, for