Lady Dedlock's lover.
One by remorse Lady Dedlock.
One by insanity Miss Flite.
One by paralysis Sir Leicester.

Besides the baby, by fever, and a lively young Frenchwoman left to be
hanged.

And all this, observe, not in a tragic, adventurous, or military story,
but merely as the further enlivenment of a narrative intended to be
amusing; and as a properly representative average of the statistics of
civilian mortality in the centre of London.

Observe further, and chiefly. It is not the mere number of deaths
(which, if we count the odd troopers in the last scene, is exceeded in
_Old Mortality_, and reached, within one or two, both in _Waverley_ and
_Guy Mannering_) that marks the peculiar tone of the modern novel. It is
the fact that all these deaths, but one, are of inoffensive, or at least
in the world's estimate respectable persons; and that they are all
grotesquely either violent or miserable, purporting thus to illustrate
the modern theology that the appointed destiny of a large average of our
population is to die like rats in a drain, either by trap or poison.
Not, indeed, that a lawyer in full practice can be usually supposed as
faultless in the eye of heaven as a dove or a woodcock; but it is not,
in former divinities, thought the will of Providence that he should be
dropped by a shot from a client behind his fire-screen, and retrieved in
the morning by his housemaid under the chandelier. Neither is Lady
Dedlock less reprehensible in her conduct than many women of fashion
have been and will be: but it would not therefore have been thought
poetically just, in old-fashioned morality, that she should be found by
her daughter lying dead, with her face in the mud of a St. Giles's
churchyard.

In the work of the great masters death is always either heroic,
deserved, or quiet and natural (unless their purpose be totally and
deeply tragic, when collateral meaner death is permitted, like that of
Polonius or Roderigo). In _Old Mortality_, four of the deaths,
Bothwell's, Ensign Grahame's, Macbriar's, and Evandale's, are
magnificently heroic; Burley's and Oliphant's long deserved, and swift;
the troopers', met in the discharge of their military duty, and the old
miser's, as gentle as the passing of a cloud, and almost beautiful in
its last words of--now unselfish--care.

'Ailie' (he aye ca'd me Ailie, we were auld acquaintance,