ON THE KNOWLEDGE OF CHARACTER.
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was guilty of the act, as much as they prove that he was unconscious of the crime[1]. In the same spirit, and I conceive with great metaphysical truth, Mr. Coleridge, in his tragedy of Remorse, makes Ordonio (his chief character) wave the acknowledgment of his meditated guilt to his own mind, by putting into his mouth that striking soliloquy:
Say, I had lay'd a body in the sun!
Well! in a month there swarm forth from the corse
A thousand, nay, ten thousand sentient beings
In place of that one man. Say I had kill'd him!
Yet who shall tell me, that each one and all
Of these ten thousand lives is not as happy
As that one life, which being push'd aside,
Made room for these unnumber'd.—Act ii. sc. ii.
Well! in a month there swarm forth from the corse
A thousand, nay, ten thousand sentient beings
In place of that one man. Say I had kill'd him!
Yet who shall tell me, that each one and all
Of these ten thousand lives is not as happy
As that one life, which being push'd aside,
Made room for these unnumber'd.—Act ii. sc. ii.
I am not sure, indeed, that I have not got this whole train of speculation from him; but I should not think the worse of it on that account. That gentleman, I recollect, once asked me whether I thought that the different members of a family really liked one another so well, or
- ↑ The bones of the murdered man were dug up in an old hermitage. On this, as one instance of the acuteness which he displayed all through the occasion, Aram remarks, “Where would you expect to find the bones of a man sooner than in a hermit’s cell, except you were to look for them in a cemetery?”—See Newgate Calendar for the year 1758 or 9.
