might have helped to abate the fever of imitation among the vulgar;--their
comparative impunity had a contrary tendency. The escape of Penautier, and
the wealthy Cardinal de Bonzy his employer, had the most pernicious
effect. For two years longer the crime continued to rage, and was not
finally suppressed till the stake had blazed, or the noose dangled, for
upwards of a hundred individuals.[40]

[40] Slow poisoning is a crime which has unhappily been revived in
England within the last few years, and which has been carried
to an extent sufficient to cast a stain upon the national
character. The poisoners have been principally women of the
lowest class, and their victims have been their husbands or
their children. The motive for the crime has in most
instances been the basest that can be imagined,--the desire
to obtain from burial-clubs to which they subscribed, the
premium, or burial-money. A recent enactment, restricting the
sale of arsenic and other poisons, will, it is to be hoped,
check, if it do not extirpate this abominable crime.--1851.

[Illustration: PALACE OF WOODSTOCK.]

HAUNTED HOUSES.

Here's a knocking indeed!... Knock! knock! knock!... Who's there,
i' the name o' Beelzebub?... Who's there, i' the devil's name?
Knock! knock! knock!--Never at quiet?--_Macbeth_.

Who has not either seen or heard of some house, shut up and uninhabitable,
fallen into decay, and looking dusty and dreary, from which, at midnight,
strange sounds have been heard to issue--aerial knockings--the rattling of
chains, and the groaning of perturbed spirits?--a house that people have
thought it unsafe to pass after dark, and which has remained for years
without a tenant, and which no tenant would occupy, even were he paid to
do so? There are hundreds of such houses in England at the present day;
hundreds in France, Germany, and almost every country of Europe, which are
marked with the mark of fear--places for the timid to avoid, and the pious
to bless themselves at, and ask protection from, as they pass--the abodes
of ghosts and evil spirits. There are many such houses in London; and if
any vain boaster of the march of intellect would but take the trouble to
find them out and count them, he would be convinced that intellect must
yet make some enormous strides before such old superstitions can be
eradicated.

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