jail. There were three other ladies at the Lakes, who had formed hopes of becoming his bride, in consequence of the attentions he had paid them; and there was an honest country gentleman, who, imposed upon by his fluent and plausible style of speech, and by the pretensions he made to piety, had recommended him to the electors of Queenborough as their representative in parliament ! The indignation excited by his adventure at Buttermere, caused a very diligent search to be made for him, but for some weeks it was ineffectual. During this interval, he appeared in Chester, but so effectually disguised, that, though known to many persons there, no one recognised him. At length, about the end of November, he was taken by a Bow Street officer at Brecknock, in Wales, and carried to London. On the way thither, and afterwards during his examinations, he maintained a quiet, plausible demeanour, affecting to consider himself as a persecuted individual, and representing, in particular, that, in the alliance with Mary Robinson, he had been rather sinned against than sinning. Mary, on the other hand, who was now announced to be likely to bear a child to her pretended husband, refused to become accessory to his prosecution. The utmost she could be prevailed on to do against Hadfield, was to address the following letter to Sir Richard Ford, of the Bow Street Office : The man whom I had the misfortune to marry, and who has ruined me and my aged and unhappy parents, always told me that he was the Hon. Colonel Hope, the next brother to the Earl of Hopetoun.-Your grateful and unfortunate servant, MARY ROBINSON.' At a fourth examination of the impostor, on the 27th of December, this letter was read aloud by the clerk in the open court. To quote a contemporary chronicleThe simplicity of this letter, which, though it breathes the soft murmur of complaint, is free from all virulence, excited in the breast of every person present an emotion of pity and respect for the unmerited sorrows of a female who has, in this whole matter, manifested a delicacy of sentiment and nobleness of mind infinitely beyond her sphere of education. The feelings of Hadfield could not be enviable; yet he exhibited no symptom of contrition, and when remanded for further examination, retired with the most impenetrable composure.' Hadfield was tried at the Carlisle spring assizes, on the charge of forging franks, which was the clearest that could be brought against him. Being found guilty, he was left for execution, and executed accordingly. To pursue the narrative of the English Opium-Eater:- On the day of his condemnation, Wordsworth and Coleridge passed through Carlisle, and endeavoured to obtain an interview with him. Wordsworth succeeded; but for some unknown reason, the prisoner steadily refused to see Coleridge-a caprice which could not be penetrated. It was true that he had, during his whole residence at Keswick, avoided Coleridge with a solicitude which had revived the original suspicions against him in some quarters, after they had generally subsided. But for this, his motive had then been sufficient: he was of a Devonshire family, and naturally feared the eye or the inquisitive examination of one who bore a name immemorially associated with the southern part of that country. Coleridge, however, had been transplanted so immaturely from his native region, that few people in England knew less of its family connections. That, perhaps, was unknown to this malefactor; but at anyrate, he knew that all motive was now at an end for disguise of any sort, so that his reserve, in this particular, was unintelligible. However, if not him, Coleridge saw and examined his very interesting papers. These were chiefly letters from women whom he had injured, pretty much in the same way and by the same impostures as he had so recently practised in Cumberland, and, as Coleridge assured me, were in part the most agonising appeals that he had ever read to human justice and pity. Great was the emotion of Coleridge when he recurred to his remembrance of these letters, and bitter-almost vindictive was the indignation with which he spoke of Hadfield. One set of letters appeared to have been written under too certain a knowledge of his villainy to whom they were addressed, though still relying on some possible remains of humanity, or perhaps, the poor writer might think, on some lingering relics of affection for herself. The other set was even more distressing; they were written under the first conflicts of suspicions, alternately repelling with warmth the gloomy doubts which were fast arising, and then yielding to their afflicting evidence; raving in one page under the misery of alarm; in another, courting the delusions of hope, and luring back the perfidious deserter-here resigning herself to despair, and there, again, labouring to shew that all might yet be well. Coleridge said often, in looking back upon that frightful exposure of human guilt and misery—and I also echoed his feeling-that the man who, when pursued by these heart-rending apostrophes, and with this litany of anguish sounding in his ears from despairing women, and from famishing children, could yet find it possible to enjoy the calm pleasures of a lake tourist, and deliberately to hunt for the picturesque, must have been a fiend of that order which fortunately does not often emerge amongst men. It is painful to remember that, in those days, amongst the multitudes who ended their career in the same ignominious way, and the majority for offences connected with the forgery of bank-notes, there must have been a considerable number who perished from the very opposite cause-namely, because they felt, too passionately and profoundly for prudence, the claims of those who looked up to them for support. One common scaffold confounds the most flinty hearts and the tenderest. However, in this instance, it was in some measure the heartless part of Hadfield's conduct which drew upon him his ruin; for the Cumberland jury, as I have been told, declared their unwillingness to hang him for having forged a frank; and both they, and those who refused to aid his escape, when first apprehended, were reconciled to this harshness entirely by what they heard of his conduct to their injured young fellow-countrywoman. 'She, meantime, under the name of the Beauty of Buttermere, became an object of interest to all England; dramas and melodramas were produced in the London theatres upon her story; and for many a year afterwards, shoals of tourists crowded to the secluded lake, and the little homely cabaret, which had been the scene of her brief romance. It was fortunate for a person in her distressing situation, that her home was not in a town. The few and simple neighbours who had witnessed her imaginary elevation, having little knowledge of worldly feelings, never for an instant connected with her disappointment any sense of the ludicrous, or spoke of it as a calamity to which her vanity might have co-operated. They treated it as unmixed injury, reflecting shame upon nobody but the wicked perpetrator. Hence, without much trial to her womanly sensibilities, she found herself able to resume her situation in the little inn. In that place, and that capacity, I saw her repeatedly, and shall here say a word upon her personal appearance, because the Lake poets all admired her greatly. Her figure was, in my eyes, good; but I doubt whether most of my readers would have thought it such. She was none of your evanescent, wasp-waisted beauties; on the contrary, she was rather large every way; tallish, and proportionably broad. Her face was fair, and her features feminine; and unquestionably she was what all the world have agreed to call "good-looking." But, except in her arms, which had something of beauty, and in her carriage, which expressed a womanly grace, together with some slight dignity and self-possession, I confess that I looked in vain for any positive qualities of any sort or degree.' A person who visited Cumberland in 1820, found Mary then united to a respectable farmer, and, unfortunately for her poetical fame, " fat and well-looking," and without anything in her appearance which might lead to the discovery, that she was a person who had at one time been the subject of the poet's song.' A SOUL IN ALL THINGS. THERE lives and works A soul in all things, and that soul is God. He sets the bright procession on its way, He marks the bounds which winter may not pass, And, ere one flowery season fades and dies, Who wore the plaited thorns with bleeding brows— But shews some touch, in freckle, streak, or stain, COWPER. |