FOOTNOTES:
[3] In the very amusing Letters of Horace Walpole to Sir Horace Mann, recently published, we find the following spirited and lively sketch of Maclaine.
“I have been in town for a day or two, and heard no conversation but about M’Laine, a fashionable highwayman, who is just taken, and who robbed me among others; as lord Eglinton, Sir Thomas Robinson of Vienna, Mrs. Talbot, &c. He took an odd booty from the Scotch earl, a blunderbuss, which lies very formidable upon the justice’s table. He was taken by selling a laced waistcoat to a pawnbroker, who happened to carry it to the very man who had just sold the lace. His history is very particular, for he confesses every thing, and is so little of a hero, that he cries and begs, and I believe, if lord Eglinton had been in any luck, might have been robbed of his own blunderbuss. His father was an Irish dean; his brother is a Calvinist minister in great esteem at the Hague. He himself was a grocer, but losing a wife that he loved extremely about two years ago, and by whom he has one little girl, he quitted his business with two hundred pounds in his pocket, which he soon spent, and then took to the road with only one companion, Plunket, a journeyman apothecary, my other friend, whom he has impeached, but who is not taken. M’Laine had a lodging in St. James’ street over against White’s, and another at Chelsea; Plunket one in Jermyn street; and their faces are as known about St. James’ as any gentleman’s who lives in that quarter, and who perhaps goes upon the road too. M’Laine had a quarrel at Putney bowling-green two months ago with an officer, whom he challenged for disputing his crank; but the captain declined, till M’Laine should produce a certificate of his nobility, which he has just received. If he had escaped a month longer, he might have heard of Mr. Chute’s genealogical expertness, and come hither to the College of Arms for a certificate. There was a wardrobe of clothes, three and twenty purses, and the celebrated blunderbuss, found at his lodgings, besides a famous kept mistress. As I conclude he will suffer, and wish him no ill, I don’t care to have his idea, and am almost single in not having been to see him. Lord Mountford, at the head of half White’s, went the first day: his aunt was crying over him: as soon as they were withdrawn, she said to him, knowing they were of White’s, ‘My dear, what did the lords say to you? have you ever been concerned with any of them?’ Was it not admirable? what a favorable idea people must have of White’s!—and what if White’s should not deserve a touch better! But the chief personages who have been to comfort and weep over this fallen hero are lady Caroline Petersham and Miss Ashe: I call them Polly and Lucy, and asked them if he did not sing, ‘Thus I stand like the Turk with his doxies around.’”
EUGENE ARAM.
The accounts of the life of this man have become of late so widely circulated, and the particulars respecting the murder of which he was the perpetrator so generally known, that any notice of him in this work would appear almost supererogatory, were it not that a charge of oversight and omission could, without injustice, be reasonably advanced against it, were we to slight over or leave unmentioned a name so notorious. We shall, therefore, give a summary of his history, commencing with an account of his family and early life, furnished by himself at the request of the two gentlemen who, at his own particular desire, attended him at his condemnation.
“I was born at Ramsgill, a little village in Netherdale, in 1704. My maternal relations had been substantial and reputable in that dale, for a great many generations: my father was of Nottinghamshire, a gardener, of great abilities in botany, and an excellent draughtsman. He served the right reverend bishop of London, Dr. Compton, with great approbation; which occasioned his being recommended to Newby, in this county, to Sir Edward Blackett, whom he served in the capacity of gardener, with much credit to himself, and satisfaction to that family, for above thirty years. Upon the decease of that baronet, he went, and was retained in the service of Sir John Ingilby, of Ripley, Bart., where he died; respected when living, and lamented when dead. My father’s ancestors were of great antiquity and consideration in the county, and originally British. Their surname is local, for they were formerly lords of the town of Haram, or Aram, on the southern banks of the Tees, and opposite to Sockburn, in Bishopric; and appear in the records of St. Mary’s, at York, among many charitable names, early and considerable benefactors to that abbey. They, many centuries ago, removed from these parts, and were settled under the fee of the lords Mowbray, in Nottinghamshire, at Haram or Aram Park, in the neighborhood of Newark upon Trent; where they were possessed of no less than three knights’ fees in the reign of Edward the Third. Their lands, I find not whether by purchase or marriage, came into the hands of the present lord Lexington. While the name existed in the county, some of them were several times high sheriffs for the county; and one was professor of divinity, if I remember right, at Oxford, and died at York. The last of the chief of this family was Thomas Aram, Esq. of Gray’s inn, and one of the commissioners of the salt office, under queen Anne. He married one of the co-heiresses of Sir John Coningsby, of North Mimms, in Hertfordshire. His seat, which was his own estate, was at the Wild, near Shenley, in Hertfordshire, where I saw him, and where he died without issue.
“I was removed very young, along with my mother, to Skelton, near Newby; and thence, at five or six years old, my father making a little purchase at Bondgate, near Ripon, his family went thither. There I went to school; where I was made capable of reading the Testament, which was all I was ever taught, except, a long time after, for about a month, in a very advanced age for that, with the reverend Mr. Alcock, of Burnsal.
“After this, about thirteen or fourteen years of age, I went to my father at Newby, and attended him in the family there, till the death of Sir Edward Blackett. It was here my propensity to literature first appeared, for being always of a solitary disposition, and uncommonly fond of retirement and books, I enjoyed here all the repose and opportunity I could wish. My study at that time was engaged in the mathematics: I know not what my acquisitions were, but I am certain my application was intense and unwearied. I found in my father’s library there, which contained a very great number of books in most branches, Kersey’s Algebra, Leybourn’s Cursus Mathematicus, Ward’s Young Mathematician’s Guide, Harris’ Algebra, &c. and a great many more; but these being the books in which I was ever most conversant, I remember them the better. I was even then equal to the management of quadratic equations, and their geometrical constructions. After we left Newby, I repeated the same studies in Bondgate, and went over all parts I had studied before, I believe not altogether unsuccessfully.
“Being about the age of sixteen, I was sent for to London, being thought, upon examination by Mr. Christopher Blackett, qualified to serve him as book-keeper in his counting-house. Here, after a year or two, I took the small-pox and suffered most severely under that distemper. I returned home again, and there with leisure on my hands, and a new addition of authors to those brought me from Newby, I renewed not only my mathematical studies, but began and prosecuted others, of a different turn, with much avidity and diligence. These were poetry, history, and antiquities; the charms of which quite destroyed all the heavier beauties of numbers in lines, whose applications and properties I now pursued no longer, except occasionally in teaching.
“I was, after some time employed in this manner, invited into Netherdale, my native air, where I first engaged in a school, and where, unfortunately enough for me, I married. The misconduct of the wife which that place afforded me, has procured me this prosecution, this prison, this infamy, and this sentence.