it. Yet why?--For he has actually seen the effect every day of his
life. The reason is--that he allows his understanding to overrule his
eyes. His understanding, which includes no intuitive knowledge of the
laws of vision, can furnish him with no reason why a line which is
known and can be proved to be a horizontal line, should not _appear_ a
horizontal line: a line, that made any angle with the perpendicular
less than a right angle, would seem to him to indicate that his houses
were all tumbling down together. Accordingly he makes the line of his
houses a horizontal line, and fails of course to produce the effect
demanded. Here then is one instance out of many, in which not only the
understanding is allowed to overrule the eyes, but where the
understanding is positively allowed to obliterate the eyes as it were:
for not only does the man believe the evidence of his understanding in
opposition to that of his eyes, but (which is monstrous!) the idiot is
not aware that his eyes ever gave such evidence. He does not know that
he has seen (and therefore _quoad_ his consciousness has _not_ seen)
that which he _has_ seen every day of his life. But to return from
this digression,--my understanding could furnish no reason why the
knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect direct or
reflected: in fact, my understanding said positively that it could
_not_ produce any effect. But I knew better: I felt that it did: and I
waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable
me to solve it.--At length, in 1812, Mr. Williams made his _debut_ on
the stage of Ratcliffe Highway, and executed those unparalleled
murders which have procured for him such a brilliant and undying
reputation. On which murders, by the way, I must observe, that in one
respect they have had an ill effect, by making the connoisseur in
murder very fastidious in his taste, and dissatisfied with any thing
that has been since done in that line. All other murders look pale by
the deep crimson of his: and, as an amateur once said to me in a
querulous tone, "There has been absolutely nothing _doing_ since his
time, or nothing that's worth speaking of." But this is wrong: for it
is unreasonable to expect all men to be great artists, and born with
the genius of Mr. Williams.--Now it will be remembered that in the
first of these murders (that of the Marrs) the same incident (of a
knocking at the door soon after the work of extermination was
comp