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‘On the afternoon of this day a coroner’s 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.... While they were preparing for dinner, the young lady, in a fit of insanity, seized a case-knife from the table, and in a menacing way pursued a little girl round the room. On the eager cry of her infirm mother to forbear, she renounced her object, and turned with loud shrieks upon her parent. The little girl by her cries brought up the landlady, but too late—the mother was lifeless in her chair, stabbed to the heart, her daughter still wildly standing over her with the knife, and the venerable old man, her father, weeping by her side, himself bleeding from a blow on the forehead from one of the forks she was throwing distractedly about.’

A few days previously she had exhibited signs of lunacy, from which she had previously suffered, and her brother—in this lay the self-wounding sting for such a nature as Elia’s—had endeavoured on the morning of the occurrence to see Dr. Pitcairn, and had failed. ‘Had that gentleman,’ it is suggested, ‘seen her, the catastrophe might have been averted.’