stake was driven through the body with the
murderer's mallet, quick-lime was thrown upon
the carcase, and the grave was filled in.

It is useless to-discuss the motives of
Williams' s crimes. Mr. De Quincey hints that Marr
and Williams had sailed to Calcutta in the
same Indiaman, and that on their return they
had both courted the young woman whom Marr
afterwards married. The second murder may
have been the result of a wish for money with
which to find means for escape: a thirst for
money and an unquenchable lust for blood, are
apparent in both. This good, at least, arose
from the horrible tragedies: they showed to the
excited and terrified city the utter incompetence
of the old watchmen, and prepared men's minds
for the necessity of a larger, younger, and more
disciplined, body of police.

There were many reasons for these murders
arousing such intense public attention. The
papers of the year previous to the Marr and
Williamson murders, record many undiscovered
crimes. These had already excited an amount
of fear which Williams's crimes heightened to
an universal paroxysm. Every sailor or dock-
labourer founa stabbed or drowned, was supposed
to be another victim of the mysterious gang,
that no one doubted haunted the east end of
London. Until Williams hung himself in his
cell, and until the clay-stained trousers and the
gory knife and jacket were found, the panic
continued and made night a hideous time. But,
then, the great storm of fear subsided slowly
into a ground-swell of sluggish distrust and
apprehension. The military patrols were soon
denounced as dangerous to the liberties of the
country, and discontinued; and the constables
resumed their inefficient and sleepy pottering
about the broader streets and the neighbourhoods
of favourite public-houses.

Gas, introduced into London on August 16,
1807, began, towards 1814, to get more general
in the larger streets; the clearer and fuller light
gave confidence to lonely pedestrians, and scared
the prowling thief and the lurking assassin.
Improvements moved slowly in the Tory country.
It was not till 1829 that Sir Robert (then Mr.)
Peel remodelled the police, and gave us for our
greater security the present force.

Mr. De Quincey, in his picturesque but rather
erroneous version of the double tragedy, has
drawn attention in a most thrilling way to its
chief points of pathos and intensity. He has
likewise passed over in silence some points of the
highest interest, and in his dates has even given
the wrong year. Let us notice a few of his
errors. He makes Marr's servant girl absent
an hour. She was really absent only thirty
minutes, seeking in vain an oyster-shop still open,
and during those thirty minutes she returned
once, looked in at the window, and saw her
master, already doomed, still busy behind the
counter. Mr. De Quincey says there was no
noise heard by the neighbours during the
murder; it is in evidence that a neighbour
did hear a chair being drawn about the floor,
and also heard the apprentice call out as if he
were being struck or scolded. Mr. De Quincey
dwells with a tragic power that places him high
among prose poets, on the awful moments
between life and death, when the journeyman,
Turner, stood watching through a glass door the
murderer plying his work; but he forgot the still
more dreadful crisis when the man, flying from
red-handed death, and crazed with fear, sought
in vain for the trap-door in the roof, well known
to him. Mr. De Quincey elsewhere colours
too highly. The poor frightened man had no
time nor presence of mind to tear his sheets and
blankets into strips, or plait and splice them.
No; he did as any one else would have done.
He sought no elaborate iron support; he tied the
sheets together and dropped from the window.
The lull of the mob when the head constable gave
orders for silence, in order that the murderer's
whereabout might be detected, is also a finely
conceived fiction. While a butcher with his axe
and a smith with a crowbar were forcing open
the cellar-flap, and some neighbours were also
throwing the front door off its hinges, the
murderer was actually heard dashing through a lower
back window, and escaping up a clayey embankment,
where his footprints were found. Hence,
next day, any men seen in Wapping with clay-
soiled trousers, were arrested.

But, from the first, Judgment was close upon
the murderer. He was known to be acquainted
with the Marr and Williamson families; he had
been observed hanging about tills, and
suspiciously haunting taprooms and public-house
passages; he was seen washing suspiciously
dirty stockings and trousers, which he then
concealed; he cut off his whiskers for no apparent
reason; besides other clues of evidence already
mentioned. To crown all, Williams was so
notorious an infamous man, for all his oily and snaky
duplicity, that the captain of his vessel, the
Roxburgh Castle, had always predicted that whenever
he went on shore he would mount the gibbet.

OLD SCENES AND SCENERY.

THE word "scene," even when confined to
theatrical uses, has very different significations. We
say that Mr. W. Beverley has painted a very fine
scene for the pantomime, and then we mean the
picture with which the stage is decorated, and
which represents the spot on which the action is
supposed to take place. In like manner, if we
say that this or that occurred in the first scene
of a piece, while that or this occurred in the
second, we mean that the first event was backed
by a certain picture, for which another was
substituted before the occurrence of the second.
On the other hand, if we say that there is a fine
scene between the Moor and lago in the third
act of Othello, we are not thinking of the picture
at all, but of the situation in which the two
characters are placed. It is in a sense analogous
to this second use of the word "scene" that the
comfortable man, who will submit to anything
rather than endure a stormy quarrel with his
better-half, declares that "he hates scenes."

If we now turn to some of the old English
plays that are supposed to have been originally