hopeless of his future,
he in all probability killed his wife in a sudden access of rage,
provoked by some taunt or reproach on her part, and then, instead of
calling in a policeman and telling him what he had done, made clumsy and
ineffectual efforts to conceal his crime. Medical opinion was divided as
to his mental condition. Those doctors called for the prosecution could
find no trace of insanity about him, those called for the defence said
that he was suffering from melancholia. The unhappy man would appear
hardly to have realised the gravity of his situation. To a friend who
visited him in prison he said: "Here's a man who can write Latin, which
the Bishop of Winchester would commend, shut up in a place like this."
Coming from a man who had spent all his life buried in books and knowing
little of the world the remark is not so greatly to be wondered at.
Profound scholars are apt to be impatient of mundane things. Professor
Webster showed a similar want of appreciation of the circumstances of a
person charged with wilful murder. Selby Watson was convicted of murder
and sentenced to death. The sentence was afterwards commuted to one of
penal servitude for life, the Home Secretary of the day showing by
his decision that, though not satisfied of the prisoner's insanity, he
recognised certain extenuating circumstances in his guilt.(2)

(2) Selby Watson was tried at the Central Criminal Court January, 1872.

In Castaing much ingenuity is shown in the conception of the crime,
but the man is weak and timid; he is not the stuff of which the great
criminal is made; Holmes is cast in the true mould of the instinctive
murderer. Castaing is a man of sensibility, capable of domestic
affection; Holmes completely insensible to all feelings of humanity.
Taking life is a mere incident in the accomplishment of his schemes;
men, women and children are sacrificed with equal mercilessness to the
necessary end. A consummate liar and hypocrite, he has that strange
power of fascination over others, women in particular, which is often
independent altogether of moral or even physical attractiveness. We
are accustomed to look for a certain vastness, grandeur of scale in the
achievements of America. A study of American crime will show that it
does not disappoint us in this expectation. The extent and audacity of
the crimes of Holmes are proof of it.

To find a counterpart in imaginative literature to the complete criminal
of the Ho