been written by a Boccaccio without genius, so sentimental, heated, and unsavoury is its general tone. The letters from the villain to the heroine whom he is tempting are modelled very closely upon those of Lovelace, and Buckminster (called "Mr. Boyer" in the book), the very last person on earth to delight in sentimental talk and to countenance the intrigues with which he is associated, is drawn an overbearing as well as an underbred prig. Just here it is interesting to learn of the fashion in which this so-called wronged lover" really received the book that would have defended him. An old lady, who was his parishioner in Portsmouth, is responsible for the statement that the minister would never allow anybody to blame Elizabeth Whitman in his presence. "I can tell you, too," she said once to Mrs. Dall, "what happened in this very room. Just after the book was published, Mr. Buckminster came to call on my mother. She was not quite ready to receive him, and probably forgot that a fresh copy of the novel, just arrived from Boston, lay upon the table. "When she came down, she found the doctor thrusting something under the coals upon the hearth. As he turned round to greet her with flaming eyes, she saw some leather covers curling in the blaze. Madam,' said he, pointing to the spot, 'there lies your book. It ought never to have been written, and it shall never be read, - at least, not in my parish. Bid the ladies take notice, wherever I find a copy I shall treat it in the same way,' and so saying, he stalked out of the room." Elizabeth Whitman's effects, carefully examined after her death, failed utterly to throw any light upon the unknown hus band for whom she was supposed to be waiting in the old Bell Tavern. But this letter, written when she was near her end, gives us a hint of her distraught state of mind, in which, however, there was still womanly forgiveness. "Must I die alone? Shall I never see you more? I know that you will come, but you will come too late. This, I fear, is my last ability. Tears fall so fast I know not how to write. Why did you leave me in such distress? But I will not reproach you. All that was dear I forsook for you, but do not regret it. May God forgive in both what was amiss. When I go from here, I will leave you some way to find me. If I die, will you come and drop a tear over my grave?" Some verses, written about the same time, conclude with this quatrain, her swan-song: "Oh, thou, for whose dear sake I bear May happy fates thy footsteps guide, Thus we leave the story of Elizabeth Whitman. Though many people have searched, none have been able to find even in the course of a century during which hundreds of old attics have yielded up long-hidden secrets-any any further papers bearing upon the facts of her strange fate. The identity of the unknown man still remains a haunting literary mystery. Many there are who say he was a nobleman, unwilling, after Elizabeth's death, to expose himself to bootless comment by stating the fact and manner of his clandestine marriage. For that there was a marriage all who have sympathetically explored the strange tale insist. So to-day the lovers of Peabody plight |