276|The Green Bag.|}}

human vice and fully arc here wonderfully comedies. Not a little ingenuity was exer illustrated. We have only to turn to a cised in carrying the plot into execution. A single shelf of law reports to find tersely and French servant was sent with an empty graphically recorded the outline of countless carriage and a letter to the schoolmistress tragedies and comedies, which no effort of announcing the dangerous illness of Mrs. the imagination could equal, and which prove Turner, and begging that the young lady over and over again the veracity of the old would return at once. The ruse was per adage that " truth is stranger than fiction." fectly successful. Miss Daulby, the school Could we invest with life these puppets of mistress, hastened her pupil's departure, and the past, who have played their parts in the she was driven to Manchester; here Mr. melodrama of life, and have left behind them Gibbons Wakefield introduced himself, and these brief records of their happiness and told the young lady a plausible story to the misery, their frailties and foibles, we should effect that her mother's health was a mere have no need to justify ourselves for speak pretext, and that the real reason for her ing of the " Romance of the Law Reports." journey was her father's pecuniary difficul Any single volume of the State Trials will ties. Since Mr. Turner had made his for be found to contain horrors that will put the tune in commerce, and a mercantile crisis had only very lately been weathered, this most sensational of Miss Braddon's produc tions to shame. Again, the vicissitudes of story found ready credence with Miss Turner, fortune are much better drawn in the law who anxiously and willingly set out in a reports than in the whole literature of the post-chaise to join her father, as she was imagination. In fact, there is no possible told to do. Gibbons Wakefield was now combination of circumstances for which some joined by his brother William. The party parallel cannot here be found. Further, the posted by a roundabout route through York law reports are the truest and most faithful shire to Kendal, and thence to Carlisle, the commentary upon the history of the nation; two brothers making good use of their time and as the history of one epoch passes into in convincing Miss Turner that her father's the romance of the next, and the nursery affairs were in the greatest confusion, and legend of the third, so here we can find the that his only hope lay in the good offices of germ of many a story which has long been an uncle of theirs, who would advance him regarded as the effect of imaginative genius. £ 60,000. Further, a letter was read pur There has seldom, if ever, been a more porting to come from Mr. Grimsditch, the thrilling story than that of the abduction of Turners' family solicitor, and advising her immediate marriage with Gibbons Wake Miss Turner. It has already served as ma field. Probably no heroine of fiction, not terial for many novelists; but the bare out line of the facts, as recorded in the reports, even Clarissa Harlowe, Miss Byrom, or Miss is sufficiently interesting. To follow the Allworthy, was placed in a more peculiar account given by Townsend, Ellen Turner, situation. To Miss Turner the horror and the daughter and heiress of William Turner, anxiety of her position were, of course, as Esq., a gentleman of large landed property, real as if there had been no conspiracy. residing at Shrigley Park, Cheshire, when With a heroism which has seldom been fifteen years old, and while still at school at equalled, she agreed, on finding that her Liverpool, attracted the attention of Mr. father could not meet her at Carlisle, to go Gibbons Wakefield. Having acquainted over the border to join him. When arrived himself with the facts as to her fortune and in Scotland, in the hope that she might expectations, he formed the design of carry thereby save the family fortunes, she gave her hand in marriage to Gibbons Wakefield, ing her off and marrying her after the ap proved fashion of Vanbrugh's or Wycherley's in the presence of a drunken blacksmith, the