Aram

Aram, EUGENE, was born in 1704 at Ramsgill, in Yorkshire. Though but the son of a poor gardener he contrived to acquire considerable learning, married early, and became a schoolmaster, first in Nidderdale, and afterwards at Knaresborough, where he became intimate with one Daniel Clarke, a shoemaker. The sudden disappearance of the latter in 1745, at a time when he happened to be in temporary possession of a quantity of valuable goods, threw suspicion upon Aram, not as Clarke's murderer, but as his confederate in swindling the public. His garden was searched, and in it was found a portion of the missing property. Aram was arrested and tried, but acquitted for want of evidence. He now left his wife at Knaresborough, acted as a schoolmaster at various places in England, acquiring, in spite of his nomadic mode of life, a knowledge of botany, heraldry, Chaldee, Arabic, Welsh, and Irish. He had already amassed considerable materials for a Comparative Lexicon of the English, Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Celtic languages. His secret was betrayed by a confederate, who excited suspicion by the loudness of his protestations that a certain skeleton that had been found near Knaresborough was not that of Clarke. The accomplice was at last driven to confess where the murdered man had been buried; the bones were exhumed and identified, and Aram was suddenly dragged from his ushership at Lynn Academy in Norfolk, and thrown into prison on a charge of murder. He was tried at York, 3d August 1759, and sentenced to be hanged within three days. At the trial he conducted his own defence, attacking with great acumen, plausibility, and curious erudition, the doctrine of circumstantial evidence. After his condemnation, he confessed his guilt, wrote a defence of suicide, but failed in an attempt to illustrate his essay. A factitious interest has been attached to Aram's miserable story from Lord Lytton's overpraised romance, Eugene Aram, and Hood's powerful ballad, 'The Dream of Eugene Aram.'