In this temper of mind she looked on herself as the murderer of an
innocent man, and, what to her was much worse, of the man she had
loved, and still did love, with all the violence imaginable. She
looked on James as the tool with which she had done this murder; and,
as it is usual for people who have rashly or inadvertently made any
animate or inanimate thing the instrument of mischief to hate the
innocent means by which the mischief was effected (for this is a
subtle method which the mind invents to excuse ourselves, the last
objects on whom we would willingly wreak our vengeance), so Miss
Matthews now hated and cursed James as the efficient cause of that act
which she herself had contrived and laboured to carry into execution.

She sat down therefore in a furious agitation, little short of
madness, and wrote the following letter:

"I Hope this will find you in the hands of justice, for the murder of
one of the best friends that ever man was blest with. In one sense,
indeed, he may seem to have deserved his fate, by chusing a fool for a
friend; for who but a fool would have believed what the anger and rage
of an injured woman suggested; a story so improbable, that I could
scarce be thought in earnest when I mentioned it?

"Know, then, cruel wretch, that poor Booth loved you of all men
breathing, and was, I believe, in your commendation guilty of as much
falsehood as I was in what I told you concerning him.

"If this knowledge makes you miserable, it is no more than you have
made the unhappy
F. MATTHEWS."