FullReads

 

 One by assassination         Mr. Tulkinghorn.
 

 One by starvation, with phthisis   Joe.
 

 One by chagrin            Richard.
 

 One by spontaneous combustion     Mr. Krook.
 

 One by sorrow             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,)
‘Ailie, take ye care and haud the gear weel thegither; for
the name of Morton of Milnwood’s gane out like the last
sough of an auld sang.’ And sae he fell out o’ ae dwam into
another, and ne’er spak a word mair, unless it were
something we cou’dna mak out, about a dipped candle being
gude eneugh to see to dee wi’. He cou’d ne’er bide to see a
moulded ane, and there was ane, by ill luck, on the table.