Amateurs of London, though undoubtedly their proceedings tend to that;
but the "_interfectori favil_" is implied in the very title of this
association, and expressed in every line of the lecture which I send you.

I am, &c. X. Y. Z.

* * * * *

LECTURE.

GENTLEMEN,--I have had the honor to be appointed by your committee to the
trying task of reading the Williams' Lecture on Murder, considered as one
of the Fine Arts; a task which might be easy enough three or four centuries
ago, when the art was little understood, and few great models had been
exhibited; but in this age, when masterpieces of excellence have been
executed by professional men, it must be evident, that in the style
of criticism applied to them, the public will look for something of a
corresponding improvement. Practice and theory must advance _pari passu_.
People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine
murder than two blockheads to kill and be killed--a knife--a purse--and a
dark lane. Design, gentlemen, grouping, light and shade, poetry, sentiment,
are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature. Mr. Williams
has exalted the ideal of murder to all of us; and to me, therefore, in
particular, has deepened the arduousness of my task. Like Æschylus or
Milton in poetry, like Michael Angelo in painting, he has carried his art
to a point of colossal sublimity; and, as Mr. Wordsworth observes, has in
a manner "created the taste by which he is to be enjoyed." To sketch the
history of the art, and to examine its principles critically, now remains
as a duty for the connoisseur, and for judges of quite another stamp from
his Majesty's Judges of Assize.