e crowd falls back in terror, and
the hardened Rowland alone dares unlock the door. Instantly, in her
shroud, mad, starved, with the flesh gnawed from her own fair shoulders,
rushes out the maniac Charlotte: in phrensied half-reason she has seized
Rowland by the throat, with the strength of insanity has strangled him,
and then falls dead upon the steps of the vault! Of Saville--who, as
having swooned, is spared all this scene of horror, and who leaves the
country for ever--little or nothing is more said: and Clopton Hall
remains a ruin, tenanted by ghosts and bats.

P.S. If thought fit, after the fashion of Parisian charcoal-burners in
ill-ventilated bed-rooms, Charlotte may have recorded her experiences in
the vault, by writing with a rusty nail on the coffin-plates.

Now, the gist of this Victor-Hugo tale of terror is its general truth: a
true end of a truly-named family, in its own neighbourhood, and long
since extinct: the house, now rebuilt and restyled--the vault--the
picture of that poor unfortunate, (how unsearchable in real life often
are the ways of Providence! how frequently the innocent suffer for the
guilty!)--the gloomy well--and something extant of the story--remains
still, and are known to some at Stratford. To do the thing graphically,
one should go there, and gain materials on the spot: and nothing could
be easier than to mix with them fifteenth-and-sixteenth-century
costumes, modes of thought, and historical allusions; accessories of the
humorous, if the age demands it, might relieve the pathetic; Charlotte's
own innocence and piety might be made to soften her hard fate, with the
assurance of a better life; Saville might become a wisely-resigned
recluse; and while the sins of the fathers are not gently, though
justly, visited on the children, the villain of the story meets his full
reward.

Behold, then, hungry novel-monger, what grist is here for the mill!
Behold, Sosii, what capabilities of orders from every library in the
kingdom!--As doomed ones, and denounced ones, and undying ones, and
unseen ones, seem to be such taking titles, what think you of the
_Buried-alive-one_!--is it not new, thrilling, terrible? Who is he that
would pander to the popular taste for details of dreadful, cruel,
criminal, and useless abominations? "Should such a one as I?" In
emptying my head of the notion, I have ministered too much already: but
the sample of henbane is poured out, an offering to the infernal manes,
a