Like most artificial people,he had a great love of nature.'Ihold three things in high estimation,'he says somewhere:'to sit lazily on an eminence that commands a rich prospect;to be shadowed by thick trees while the sun shines around me;and to enjoy solitude with the consciousness of neighbourhood.The country gives them all to me.'He writes about his wandering over fragrant furze and heath repeating Collins's 'Ode to Evening,'just to catch the fine quality of the moment;about smothering his face 'in a watery bed of cowslips,wet with May dews';and about the pleasure of seeing the sweet-breathed kine 'pass slowly homeward through the twilight,'and hearing 'the distant clank of the sheep-bell.'One phrase of his,'the polyanthus glowed in its cold bed of earth,like a solitary picture of Giorgione on a dark oaken panel,'is curiously characteristic of his temperament,and this passage is rather pretty in its way:-The short tender grass was covered with marguerites -'such that men called DAISIES in our town'-thick as stars on a summer's night.The harsh caw of the busy rooks came pleasantly mellowed from a high dusky grove of elms at some distance off,and at intervals was heard the voice of a boy scaring away the birds from the newly-sown seeds.The blue depths were the colour of the darkest ultramarine;not a cloud streaked the calm aether;only round the horizon's edge streamed a light,warm film of misty vapour,against which the near village with its ancient stone church showed sharply out with blinding whiteness.I thought of Wordsworth's 'Lines written in March.'
However,we must not forget that the cultivated young man who penned these lines,and who was so susceptible to Wordsworthian influences,was also,as I said at the beginning of this memoir,one of the most subtle and secret poisoners of this or any age.
How he first became fascinated by this strange sin he does not tell us,and the diary in which he carefully noted the results of his terrible experiments and the methods that he adopted,has unfortunately been lost to us.Even in later days,too,he was always reticent on the matter,and preferred to speak about 'The Excursion,'and the 'Poems founded on the Affections.'There is no doubt,however,that the poison that he used was strychnine.In one of the beautiful rings of which he was so proud,and which served to show off the fine modelling of his delicate ivory hands,he used to carry crystals of the Indian NUX VOMICA,a poison,one of his biographers tells us,'nearly tasteless,difficult of discovery,and capable of almost infinite dilution.'His murders,says De Quincey,were more than were ever made known judicially.
This is no doubt so,and some of them are worthy of mention.His first victim was his uncle,Mr.Thomas Griffiths.He poisoned him in 1829to gain possession of Linden House,a place to which he had always been very much attached.In the August of the next year he poisoned Mrs.Abercrombie,his wife's mother,and in the following December he poisoned the lovely Helen Abercrombie,his sister-in-law.Why he murdered Mrs.Abercrombie is not ascertained.It may have been for a caprice,or to quicken some hideous sense of power that was in him,or because she suspected something,or for no reason.But the murder of Helen Abercrombie was carried out by himself and his wife for the sake of a sum of about 18,000pounds,for which they had insured her life in various offices.The circumstances were as follows.On the 12th of December,he and his wife and child came up to London from Linden House,and took lodgings at No.12Conduit Street,Regent Street.With them were the two sisters,Helen and Madeleine Abercrombie.On the evening of the 14th they all went to the play,and at supper that night Helen sickened.The next day she was extremely ill,and Dr.
Locock,of Hanover Square,was called in to attend her.She lived till Monday,the 20th,when,after the doctor's morning visit,Mr.and Mrs.Wainewright brought her some poisoned jelly,and then went out for a walk.When they returned Helen Abercrombie was dead.
She was about twenty years of age,a tall graceful girl with fair hair.A very charming red-chalk drawing of her by her brother-in-law is still in existence,and shows how much his style as an artist was influenced by Sir Thomas Lawrence,a painter for whose work he had always entertained a great admiration.De Quincey says that Mrs.Wainewright was not really privy to the murder.Let us hope that she was not.Sin should be solitary,and have no accomplices.
The insurance companies,suspecting the real facts of the case,declined to pay the policy on the technical ground of misrepresentation and want of interest,and,with curious courage,the poisoner entered an action in the Court of Chancery against the Imperial,it being agreed that one decision should govern all the cases.The trial,however,did not come on for five years,when,after one disagreement,a verdict was ultimately given in the companies'favour.The judge on the occasion was Lord Abinger.
