of delight, as the poor girl, dressed in white (at
her own desire), ascended the steps firmly.
The interest was intense, because it was
fervently expected that she would make in public
a final and decided denial of the crime of which
she had been found guilty. So it proved.

Mr. Peter Burke, who has taken great
interest in the innocence of this victim of bad
law, says that she ascended the scaffold about
a quarter-past eight.

"A few minutes before she ascended the
scaffold, the Reverend Mr. Cotton, the Ordinary
of Newgate, asked her whether she had any
communication to make; she paused for a
moment, and then said with firmness and strong
emphasis, 'Before the just and Almighty God,
and by the faith of the Holy Sacrament I have
taken, I am innocent of the offence with which
I am charged.' She afterwards said, in an
indistinct tone of voice, what seemed to the
bystanders to be, 'that the truth of the business
would be disclosed in the course of the day.'
The Reverend Mr. Cotton, anxious to learn
precisely what she uttered, requested her to
repeat her words. She then said, 'I am innocent,
and I hope, in God, the truth may be
disclosed in the course of the day.' She prayed
fervently, and seemed perfectly resigned to
her fate. On being asked in the last awful
moment to confess her crime, she unhesitatingly
declared, as she had done throughout her
imprisonment, in the most solemn manner, her
perfect innocence. She also expressed her
resignation, and her confidence of entering the
kingdom of Heaven. This she repeated while
the executioner was preparing for his fearful
office. The last words of Eliza Fenning, on
being addressed by the attendant clergyman,
were, 'I know my situation, and may I never
enter the kingdom of Heaven, to which I feel
confident I am going, if I am not innocent.'

"A thrill of agony ran through the hearts
of that vast crowd when the bolt fell, and the
slender form in white swayed in the wind and
rain. For her, elsewhere there was mercy; we
do not doubt it."

The executioner, after demanding fees
oppressive to poor people, although in this instance
no more than fourteen shillings, was allowed to
surrender the body of Eliza Fenning to her
friends. They resolved on a public funeral, as
at once an assertion of innocence and an appeal
to popular sympathy. She was buried on the
31st of July, at St. George's-the-Martyr. There
were ten thousand persons in the churchyard,
as the coffin, inscribed,

ELIZA FENNING,
Died July 26th, 1815, aged 22 years,

was lowered into the grave. To that grave-side,
there had followed the body, a long procession.
Six young women dressed in white had supported
the pall. The coffin was preceded by a dozen
constables, and followed by about thirty more.
There were several hundred mourners. Many
thousand persons succeeded them. The windows,
and even the tops of the houses, were thronged
by spectators. The people of London wept
for her, and the great generous heart of London
is seldom in the wrong in such a case.

As usual, however, when partisan feeling is
excited, the recorder party set afloat many
hasty, unsifted, and cruel calumnies. It was
reported that Eliza Fenning had, when a child,
been turned out of the schools in Lincoln's
Inn-fields for dissolute conduct; that, at Mr.
Turner's, she had nightly visited the apprentices'
bedroom; that, even in Newgate, she
had fallen in love with some of the prisoners, and
written to them in terms of the grossest
licentiousness. With these things we have nothing to
do; the question is simply, did she intentionally
mix poison with the Turners' food? We are filled
with a deep conviction that she was entirely innocent.
With many persons the case will, perhaps,
always remain a problem. In the Annual
Register for 1857, it is stated, on the authority
of Mr. Gurney, that Eliza Fenning, on the
morning of her execution, confessed the crime
to Mr. James Upton, a Baptist minister. If
this statement were true, it would authoritatively
end the matter, but we disbelieve it in
toto. Weak ministers, unaccustomed to give
spiritual advice to persons condemned to death,
get flurried and confused in a prison cell.
Importuned to confess, the poor girl, no doubt,
made some general confession of her utter
sinfulness; and this the Baptist minister, perhaps
previously prejudiced, may have mistaken or
exaggerated. We implicitly believe that he did
this (it may be, with some little unconscious
touch of vanity in his own powers of working
repentance, but we do not think, wilfully). The
evidence of Mr. Cotton, a man of tried
experience, is expressly contrary to any such
testimony. Curran used to declaim glowingly on
the unhappy fate of Eliza Fenning; Hone, the
ardent politician and author of the Every Day
Book, published an authentic report of her
trial, as an antidote to the garbled summary of
it put forth in the Old Bailey Sessions Paper,
with curious letters from the prisoner herself;
and, in our own time, Mr. Charles Phillips
wrote a brilliant rhapsody on the fate of one—
"so young, so fair, so innocent''—cut down
in the morning, with all life's brightness only
in its dawn. "Little," says this writer, "did
it profit thee that a city mourned over thy early
grave, and that the most eloquent of men
(Curran, a fellow-countryman) did justice to
thy memory!"

We reserve for our concluding paragraph, the
statement that the Judge who tried this case was
an Advocate against the girl, and was unfeeling,
and unfair.

Now ready, bound in cloth, price 5s. 6d.,

VOLUME THE SEVENTEENTH.