violence of her reproaches, Lord Forrester answered her with bitterness and violence equal to her own. The altercation grew more and more angry in its tone, and at length his lordship applied a name to Mrs Nimmo the most degrading that can be used to one of her sex. The miserable woman could not say with the innocent Desdemona: 'Am I that name which he did call me?' But the sting was not the less severe from being merited, and fell with tenfold force when coming from the lips of him who had been in some measure the cause of her meriting the epithet. All the fiery passions of Christian Nimmo's nature were aroused. In the revengeful madness of the moment, she snatched at the sword which hung by his lordship's side, pulled it from the scabbard, and in an instant stabbed him through the body. Lord Forrester did not fall with the blow, but the enraged woman repeated it, and he dropped to the ground. He died almost immediately. The spot on which he fell was directly under the tree by the side of the pigeon-house.

The guilty woman fled from the scene of death as soon as she could recall her thoughts sufficiently to be sensible of the consequences of her act. She gained one of the doors of the castle, and made her way unperceived up the long flights of stairs till she reached an old lumber garret-room, where she secreted herself among the useless furniture and other articles, in such a way as might have rendered it no easy matter to discover her retreat, had not an accident betrayed it. The deed in the garden was seen from a short distance by three persons, who rushed to the spot, and found Lord Forrester covered with blood and lifeless. The alarm was immediately given, and erelong the horror-struck servants of the family were on the search for the murderess. She had been seen to run towards the castle, and to that quarter was the attention of the pursuers directed. They sought long in vain, until in one room the slipper of the wretched woman was found on the floor. The closets of that apartment were then examined, in the full assurance that Mrs Nimmo must be there. But this proved not to

be the case, and the pursuers were still at fault, when it chanced that one person, standing on the very spot where the slipper was found, cast a glance upwards to the ceiling, and beheld a hole in the floor above. It immediately struck this person, that the slipper had fallen through, and that the object of their search would be in the garret above. That conjecture was correct. Being rotten, and long untrodden, the floor of the garret had given way under Nimmo's foot, and though she had retracted the foot, the slipper had fallen into the room below. The unhappy creature was dragged from her concealment, and the ministers of justice being made acquainted with what had occurred, she was taken to Edinburgh, and lodged, before the sun went down that had witnessed her crime, in the Tolbooth of the city, or, to give it its more famous name, the Heart of Mid-Lothian.

It may well be supposed, that the rank and station of the victim of this dreadful act, as well as the relationship of the parties, and the unhappy circumstances in which they stood with regard to each other, caused the affair to make an extraordinary impression on the public mind. On the second day after the deed, the 28th of August, Christian Nimmo was examined by the sheriffs of Edinburgh. She confessed the fact,' says Lord Fountainhall in his Decisions, but pretended that she was provoked thereto, because he, Lord Forrester, in his drink had abused her with the vilest terms of reproach.' She retained complete presence of mind, and made 'a long discourse of the circumstances and manner of the act, seeking to palliate and extenuate it.' The tenor of her statement was, that it was well known that Lord Forrester, when under the influence of drink, was very furious; that he was so on this occasion; that he drew his sword and ran at her with it; that she took it from him to preserve herself from hazard; and that he ran in his blind fury upon the sword's point, and thereby gave himself the mortal injury whereof he died.

The three witnesses-two men, and Christian Nimmo's

own woman-proved this statement to be totally false. They had seen her draw the sword with her own hands from his lordship's side, and stab him with it. Moreover, one wound only would have been inflicted, in all likelihood, had the matter occurred as described by her, whereas several wounds appeared on his lordship's body, shewing the furious passion by which the murderess had been actuated. This plea failing, therefore, Christian Nimmo, though she held obstinately to the last by the same assertions, betook herself also to other schemes for averting the consequences of her act. She declared herself likely to become a mother; but a medical commission which was thereupon appointed, deponed, to the best of their judgment, that no signs existed of this averment being true. It was accordingly regarded as a mere shift to procure delay.' Before the fate of Christian Nimmo was decided by the courts of the period, she made another attempt to evade justice, and was to a certain extent successful. Having been supplied by some of her emissaries with man's apparel, she contrived to make her escape in that dress from the Tolbooth, on the 29th of September, about five o'clock at night, in the gloaming.' Her intention was to cross the English border, and she bent her course in that direction. Being on foot, however, she was able only to reach Fala-mill, about fifteen miles from Edinburgh, on the night of her escape. She remained here till the morning, and, before she could resume her flight, was taken by the officers of justice, who had discovered her route, and followed closely on her footsteps. Tradition says, that she was aware of their approach before they seized her, and that she fled, and might possibly have escaped through her great bodily activity, had not a man, from mere wantonness, put out his foot as she passed him, and tripped her. Whether this part of the story be true or not, she was certainly taken, and reconveyed to the Tolbooth of Edinburgh.

No further incident occurred to impede the course of justice in this remarkable case. Christian Nimmo was

tried, found guilty, and sentenced to be beheaded. One point came out in the evidence, worthy of notice as exemplifying the natural violence of this wretched woman's temper. It was discovered, to use Fountainhall's words, that she ordinarily carried a sword beneath her petticoats,' though from her using his lordship's weapon, this does not appear to have been the case at the time of the murder. The closing scene of Christian Nimmo's life took place on the 12th of November 1679, at the Cross of Edinburgh. She appeared on the scaffold dressed all in mourning, with a large wail (veil), and, before the laying down of her head, she laid it (the veil) off, and put on a whyte taffetie hood, and bared her shoulders with her own hands, with seeming courage eneugh.' The stroke of the maiden-a well-known instrument, resembling the guillotine-terminated the guilty career of Christian Nimmo.

In the closet of Lord Forrester, after his decease, was found the dispensation from the pope already alluded to, if we may trust to the authority of a work called Popery and Schism equally Dangerous in the Church of England. In closing his account of this striking case, Lord Fountainhall notices that the females of the house of Grange appear to have been of a peculiarly unhappy temperament in other instances than this. Christian Nimmo's 'cusing germane, Mrs Bedford,' murdered her husband under circumstances of great aggravation; 'and they say that the Ladie Warriston, who about 100 years ago strangled her husband Kincaid of Warriston, was of the same family?'

Such is the story of the pigeon-house and old tree of Corstorphine, and such the basis of the superstition relative to the white lady, said to wander and wail by moonlight with the bloody sword in her hand, around the scene of her guilt. The whole connection between Lord Forrester and Christian Nimmo was, indeed, peculiarly criminal, since she was, to use again the words of Fountainhall, my lord's first lady's niece; so that the visible judgment of God may be read both upon

her and him. The family of Forrester of Corstorphine was not continued through this unhappy lord, but through William Baillie, his brother, who married the fifth daughter of the first Lord Forrester, and succeeded, by the terms of entail, to the title and estates. His descendant by the female side is now Lord Forrester of Corstorphine, being at the same time Viscount Grimston in the Irish, and Earl Verulam in the British peerage.

THEODORE, KING OF CORSICA.

THEODORE BARON NEUHOFF was one of the most extraordinary characters of the last century. He was born in the district of Marck, in Westphalia, and succeeded to a considerable patrimony, which had been for several generations in the possession of the noble family whose title descended to him. Theodore was educated in the French service, and afterwards travelled, in pursuit of various objects, into England, the Netherlands, and Italy. He shewed himself to be possessed of excellent abilities, and had a strong liking for daring and romantic enterprise. While travelling in Italy, he was forcibly struck with the unsettled state of the island of Corsica, then, as it had been for several centuries, a dependency of the republic of Genoa. The Genoese had ruled the Corsicans most tyrannically, and had roused them on various occasions to insurrection. In 1729, shortly before Theodore's attention was particularly directed to the subject, the islanders had risen against their oppressors. The immediate cause of the movement was a very slight A paolo, or coin about the value of fivepence (English), being due by a poor elderly woman to a Genoese tax-collector, the latter had the cruelty to seize on the poor debtor's whole effects, which exasperated her countrymen to such an extent, that they flew to

one.