ago; and I ask the indulgence of the reader if I repeat myself:--

"Here, unlike the milder guilt of Paul Clifford, the author was not
to imply reform to society, nor open in this world atonement and
pardon to the criminal. As it would have been wholly in vain to
disguise, by mean tamperings with art and truth, the ordinary habits
of life and attributes of character which all record and remembrance
ascribed to Eugene Aram; as it would have defeated every end of the
moral inculcated by his guilt, to portray, in the caricature of the
murderer of melodrama, a man immersed in study, of whom it was noted
that he turned aside from the worm in his path,--so I have allowed
to him whatever contrasts with his inexpiable crime have been
recorded on sufficient authority. But I have invariably taken care
that the crime itself should stand stripped of every sophistry, and
hideous to the perpetrator as well as to the world. Allowing all by
which attention to his biography may explain the tremendous paradox
of fearful guilt in a man aspiring after knowledge, and not
generally inhumane; allowing that the crime came upon him in the
partial insanity produced by the combining circumstances of a brain
overwrought by intense study, disturbed by an excited imagination
and the fumes of a momentary disease of the reasoning faculty,
consumed by the desire of knowledge, unwholesome and morbid, because
coveted as an end, not a means, added to the other physical causes
of mental aberration to be found in loneliness, and want verging
upon famine,--all these, which a biographer may suppose to have
conspired to his crime, have never been used by the novelist as
excuses for its enormity, nor indeed, lest they should seem as
excuses, have they ever been clearly presented to the view. The
moral consisted in showing more than the mere legal punishment at
the close. It was to show how the consciousness of the deed was to