crime thus committed should have been so episodical and apart from the
rest of his career that, however it might rankle in his conscience, it
should never have hardened his nature; that through a life of some
duration, none of the errors, none of the vices, which would seem
essentially to belong to a character capable of a deed so black, from
motives apparently so sordid, should have been discovered or suspected,--
all this presents all anomaly in human conduct so rare and surprising
that it would be difficult to find any subject more adapted for that
metaphysical speculation and analysis, in order to indulge which,
Fiction, whether in the drama or the higher class of romance, seeks its
materials and grounds its lessons in the chronicles of passion and crime.

[For I put wholly out of question the excuse of jealousy, as
unsupported by any evidence, never hinted at by Aram himself
(at least on any sufficient authority), and at variance with the
only fact which the trial establishes; namely, that the robbery was
the crime planned, and the cause, whether accidental or otherwise,
of the murder.]

The guilt of Eugene Aram is not that of a vulgar ruffian; it leads to
views and considerations vitally and wholly distinct from those with
which profligate knavery and brutal cruelty revolt and displease us in
the literature of Newgate and the hulks. His crime does, in fact, belong
to those startling paradoxes which the poetry of all countries, and
especially of our own, has always delighted to contemplate and examine.
Whenever crime appears the aberration and monstrous product of a great
intellect or of a nature ordinarily virtuous, it becomes not only the
subject for genius, which deals with passions, to describe, but a problem
for philosophy, which deals with actions, to investigate and solve; hence
the Macbeths and Richards, the Iagos and Othellos. My regret, therefore,