took another draught, everybody looked at everybody else, and
exclaimed, 'Horrid!'

'It appears in evidence, gentlemen,' continued Mr. Bolton, 'that, on the
evening of yesterday, Sawyer the baker came home in a reprehensible state
of beer. Mrs. S., connubially considerate, carried him in that condition
up-stairs into his chamber, and consigned him to their mutual couch. In
a minute or two she lay sleeping beside the man whom the morrow's dawn
beheld a murderer!' (Entire silence informed the reporter that his
picture had attained the awful effect he desired.) 'The son came home
about an hour afterwards, opened the door, and went up to bed. Scarcely
(gentlemen, conceive his feelings of alarm), scarcely had he taken off
his indescribables, when shrieks (to his experienced ear _maternal_
shrieks) scared the silence of surrounding night. He put his
indescribables on again, and ran down-stairs. He opened the door of the
parental bed-chamber. His father was dancing upon his mother. What must
have been his feelings! In the agony of the minute he rushed at his male
parent as he was about to plunge a knife into the side of his female.
The mother shrieked. The father caught the son (who had wrested the
knife from the paternal grasp) up in his arms, carried him down-stairs,
shoved him into a copper of boiling water among some linen, closed the
lid, and jumped upon the top of it, in which position he was found with a
ferocious countenance by the mother, who arrived in the melancholy
wash-house just as he had so settled himself.

'"Where's my boy?" shrieked the mother.

'"In that copper, boiling," coolly replied the benign father.

'Struck by the awful intelligence, the mother rushed from the house, and
alarmed the neighbourhood. The police entered a minute afterwards. The
father, having bolted the wash-house door, had bolted himself. They
dragged the lifeless body of the boiled baker from the cauldron, and,
with a promptitude commendable in men of their station, they immediately
carried it to the station-house. Subsequently, the baker was apprehended
while seated on the top of a lamp-post in Parliament Street, lighting his
pipe.'

The whole horrible ideality of the Mysteries of Udolpho, condensed into
the pithy effect of a ten-line paragraph, could not possibly have so
affected the narrator's auditory. Silence, the purest and most noble of
all kinds of applause, bore ample testimony to the barbarity of the
bake