ot he the culprit, but some other man, were the
tempted. The last chapters were to be written in the condemned cell, to
which his wickedness, all elaborately elicited from him as if told of
another, had brought him. Discovery by the murderer of the utter
needlessness of the murder for its object, was to follow hard upon
commission of the deed; but all discovery of the murderer was to be
baffled till towards the close, when, by means of a gold ring which had
resisted the corrosive effects of the lime into which he had thrown the
body, not only the person murdered was to be identified but the locality
of the crime and the man who committed it.[287] So much was told to me
before any of the book was written; and it will be recollected that the
ring, taken by Drood to be given to his betrothed only if their
engagement went on, was brought away with him from their last
interview. Rosa was to marry Tartar, and Crisparkle the sister of
Landless, who was himself, I think, to have perished in assisting Tartar
finally to unmask and seize the murderer.

Nothing had been written, however, of the main parts of the design
excepting what is found in the published numbers; there was no hint or
preparation for the sequel in any notes of chapters in advance; and
there remained not even what he had himself so sadly written of the book
by Thackeray also interrupted by death. The evidence of matured designs
never to be accomplished, intentions planned never to be executed, roads
of thought marked out never to be traversed, goals shining in the
distance never to be reached, was wanting here. It was all a blank.
Enough had been completed nevertheless to give promise of a much greater
book than its immediate predecessor. "I hope his book is finished,"
wrote Longfellow when the news of his death was flashed to America. "It
is certainly one of his most beautiful works, if not the most beautiful
of all. It would be too sad to think the pen had fallen from his hand,
and left it incomplete." Some of its characters were touched with
subtlety, and in its descriptions his imaginative power was at its best.
Not a line was wanting to the reality, in the most minute local detail,
of places the most widely contrasted; and we saw with equal vividness
the lazy cathedral town and the lurid opium-eater's den.[288] Something
like the old lightness and buoyancy of animal spirits gave a new
freshness to the humour; the scenes of the child-heroine and her
luckless