[The following is the report of the inquest upon Mrs. Lamb which
appeared in the _Morning Chronicle_ for September 26, 1796. The tragedy
had occurred on Thursday, September 22:--

On Friday afternoon the Coroner and a respectable Jury sat on the body
of a Lady in the neighbourhood of Holborn, who died in consequence of a
wound from her daughter the preceding day. It appeared by the evidence
adduced, that while the family were preparing for dinner, the young lady
seized a case knife laying on the table, and in a menacing manner
pursued a little girl, her apprentice, round the room; on the eager
calls of her helpless infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her first
object, and with loud shrieks approached her parent.

The child by her cries quickly brought up the landlord of the house, but
too late--the dreadful scene presented to him the mother lifeless,
pierced to the heart, on a chair, her daughter yet wildly standing over
her with the fatal knife, and the venerable old man, her father, weeping
by her side, himself bleeding at the forehead from the effects of a
severe blow he received from one of the forks she had been madly hurling
about the room.

For a few days prior to this the family had observed some symptoms of
insanity in her, which had so much increased on the Wednesday evening,
that her brother early the next morning went in quest of Dr.
Pitcairn--had that gentleman been met with, the fatal catastrophe had,
in all probability, been prevented.

It seems the young Lady had been once before, in her earlier years,
deranged, from the harassing fatigues of too much business.--As her
carriage towards her mother was ever affectionate in the extreme, it is