art have been and may be yet created. The murder of Mr. Arden of
Faversham inspired an Elizabethan tragedy attributed by some
critics to Shakespeare. The Peltzer trial helped to inspire Paul
Bourget's remarkable novel, "Andre Cornelis." To Italian crime
we owe Shelley's "Cenci" and Browning's "The Ring and the Book."
Mrs. Manning was the original of the maid Hortense in "Bleak
House." Jonathan Wild, Eugene Aram, Deacon Brodie, Thomas
Griffiths Wainewright have all been made the heroes of books or
plays of varying merit. But it is not only in its stories
that crime has served to inspire romance. In the investigation
of crime, especially on the broader lines of Continental
procedure, we can track to the source the springs of conduct and
character, and come near to solving as far as is humanly possible
the mystery of human motive. There is always and must be in
every crime a terra incognita which, unless we could enter into
the very soul of a man, we cannot hope to reach. Thus far may we
go, no farther. It is rarely indeed that a man lays bare his
whole soul, and even when he does we can never be quite sure that
he is telling us all the truth, that he is not keeping back some
vital secret. It is no doubt better so, and that it should be
left to the writer of imagination to picture for us a man's
inmost soul. The study of crime will help him to that end. It
will help us also in the ethical appreciation of good and evil in
individual conduct, about which our notions have been somewhat
obscured by too narrow a definition of what constitutes crime.
These themes, touched on but lightly and imperfectly in these
pages, are rich in human interest.

And so it is hardly a matter for surprise that the poet and the
philosopher sat up late one night talking about murders.