We have now approached a period when all speculation becomes more or less vain, and when our course must be confined as much as possible to the relation of facts and circumstances, deeply mournful in themselves, and rendered doubly so, first, by the mystery in which they have been shrouded, and next, by the surmises that have been formed in connection with them. Fiction can never have a tragedy so horrible as that which the imagination often builds on unconnected and disputable facts, or on the partial knowledge of a melancholy truth. In that truth, as far as it is clearly ascertainable, there is, without resorting to needless surmise, more than enough to shock sensibility, and to raise to the dead a lasting monument of the sweetest pity, unprofaned by those images of horror, which hasty apprehensions would conjure up around it.

A close adherence to a statement of facts, arranged with no art or effect that is not essential to a simple elucidation (if it be possible) of the truth, is the most just and delicate course that can be adopted in relation to the feelings and interests of the living. This course, and this alone,