s with actions, to investigate and
solve; hence the Macbeths and Richards, the Iagos and Othellos. My
regret, therefore, is not that I chose a subject unworthy of elevated
fiction, but that such a subject did not occur to some one capable of
treating it as it deserves; and I never felt this more strongly than
when the late Mr. Godwin (in conversing with me after the publication
of this romance) observed that he had always thought the story of Eugene
Aram peculiarly adapted for fiction, and that he had more than once
entertained the notion of making it the foundation of a novel. I can
well conceive what depth and power that gloomy record would have taken
from the dark and inquiring genius of the author of "Caleb Williams."
In fact, the crime and trial of Eugene Aram arrested the attention and
engaged the conjectures of many of the most eminent men of his own time.
His guilt or innocence was the matter of strong contest; and so keen
and so enduring was the sensation created by an event thus completely
distinct from the ordinary annals of human crime that even History
turned aside from the sonorous narrative of the struggles of parties
and the feuds of kings to commemorate the learning and the guilt of
the humble schoolmaster of Lynn. Did I want any other answer to the
animadversions of commonplace criticism, it might be sufficient to
say that what the historian relates the novelist has little right to
disdain.

Before entering on this romance, I examined with some care the
probabilities of Aram's guilt; for I need scarcely perhaps observe that
the legal evidence against him is extremely deficient,--furnished almost
entirely by one (Houseman) confessedly an accomplice of the crime and
a partner in the booty, and that in the present day a man tried
upon evidence so scanty and suspicious would unquestionably escape
conviction. Nevertheless, I must frankly own that the moral evidence
appeared to me more convincing than the legal; and though not without
some doubt, which, in common with many, I still entertain of the real
facts of the murder, I adopted that view which, at all events, was the
best suited to the higher purposes of fiction. On the whole, I still
think that if the crime were committed by Aram, the motive was not very
far removed from one which led recently to a remarkable murder in Spain.
A priest in that country, wholly absorbed in learned pursuits, and
apparently of spotless life, confessed that, being debarred