Page:Blanchard on L. E. L.pdf/205

Rh upon their oaths, and subjected to a close and strict examination."

The letter from which we have, in justice to Mr. Maclean, extracted the foregoing statement, contains some passages that appear to he necessary to a better understanding, first of the circumstances under which L. E. L. wrote her complaints of the "wants, hardships, and house-keeping troubles" to which she was exposed; and next of the conduct which she experienced from her husband, amidst the many distressing influences of illness and occupation that beset him from the moment of his arrival.

Certain allusions in Mr. Maclean's letter to the vague and unsupported rumour, that his wife owed her death to the jealousy of a native female, we pass by, the subject being one on which it is now useless and painful to enter. Mr. Maclean, we presume, was never suspected of having anything either to conceal or to disclose in relation to such a rumour. It is the reference to his own "conduct," and to her "complaints," with which, as a matter of vital interest, we have here to do; and it is exactly the same feeling, the same sense of justice and honour, animating from the beginning the endeavour to do justice to the character of the dead, that has prompted an application to Mr. Maclean's friends in England, for permission to print the passages referred to, in his vindication and in hers—in explanation of much that might otherwise have remained conflicting and mysterious.*