ABSTRACT
William Palmer, the Poisoner, has passed by a terrible and opprobrious death to the bar of a more awful tribunal, and to the presence of a mightier audience than that before which he publicly stood for so many days in London. For what other deeds he has to be there arraigned we shall never know in this world. Enough, however, has been proved, to the satisfaction of all thinking minds, to consign him to a doom which could not have been aggravated on earth had everything of which he was guilty been adduced. It is no subtle or recondite moral that his fate inculcates. More than once of late years, he has had large sums of money in his possession, and yet, from the moment of his first frauds, he never regained a chance of independence or of solvency; since the same epoch, he endeavoured to parry immediate and pressing dangers, by incurring progressively higher and worse risks, which were not to be so instantaneously encountered, but which were inevitable in their own time – until, from the fraud of a bill which there was no rational prospect of meeting when due, he advanced to the deeper fraud of forged acceptances, continually renewed by fresh forgeries; and so, step by step, to the plunder of insurance companies by means of policies made available through the assassination of the insured; and, lastly, to robbery with his own hand at the death-bed of the man whom he had murdered.
