t, and as careless of the future. This is a type, mark you, gentle
reader, which is not overdrawn, as the writer has reason to know; it
existed in London in the days of Dickens, and it exists to-day, with the
qualification that many who ought, perforce of their instincts, to be
classed therewith do just enough work of an incompetent kind to keep them
well out from under the shadow of the law; these are the "Sykeses" of a
former day, not the "Fagins", who are possessed of a certain amount of
natural wit, if it be of a perverted kind.

An event which occurred in 1828, almost unparalleled in the annals of
criminal atrocity, is significantly interesting with regard to Dickens'
absorption of local and timely accessory, mostly of fact as against purely
imaginative interpolation merely:

A man named Burke (an Irishman) and a woman named Helen M'Dougal,
coalesced with one Hare in Edinburgh to murder persons by wholesale, and
dispose of their bodies to the teachers of anatomy. According to the
confession of the principal actor, sixteen persons, some in their sleep,
others after intoxication, and several in a state of infirmity from
disease, were suffocated. One of the men generally threw himself on the
victim to hold him down, while the other "burked" him by forcibly pressing
the nostrils and mouth, or the throat, with his hands. Hare being admitted
as king's evidence, Burke and his other partner in guilt were arraigned on
three counts. Helen M'Dougal was acquitted and Burke was executed.

This crime gave a new word to our language. To "burke" is given in our
dictionaries as "to murder by suffocation so as to produce few signs of
violence upon the victim." Or to bring it directly home to Dickens, the
following quotation will serve:

"'You don't mean to say he was "burked," Sam?' said Mr. Pickwick."

With no class of society did Dickens deal more successfully than with the
sordidness of crime. He must have been an observer of the most acute
perceptions, and while in many cases it was only minor crimes of which he
dealt, the vagaries of his assassins are unequalled in fiction. He was
generally satisfied with ordinary methods, as with the case of Lawyer
Tulkinghorn's murder in Lincoln's Inn Fields, but even in this scene he
does throw into crime something more than the ordinary methods of the
English novelist. He had the power, one might almost say the Shakespearian
power, of not only describing a crime, but also of making you f