tion directly in the affirmative; that he had seen the King, and that the King had given him money, was proved by the Duchess of Portsmouth, and her maid, Mrs. Wall, and by Sheriff Cornish. A clergyman, named Hawkins, published an account of this case, full of falsehoods, and was in consequence made "most dirty Dean" (c) of Chichester. I think, that no one who reads the trial impartially, can avoid the conviction that it bears traces of contrivance and collusion (d), and that there was much concealed that it would by no means have been for the King's honour to disclose. It is plain that the intention of the libel was uncertain, and that the conviction of Fitzharris was illegal. "Quo animo, a thing is done, in all overt acts of a design, is one of the main questions" (e).

The Whigs were now odious to the public.

The law was a weapon in the hands of their most bitter enemies, and it was wielded by men who never knew remorse or scruple.

Scroggs was disgraced, and Jeffreys became the chief agent of the government. The English law has, indeed, in all ages produced its full share of pedants, hypocrites, and slaves to power; but it would be libelling any pursuit followed by beings in human shape, to suppose that it could furnish many men as thoroughly execrable as this consummate villain-"donanda vitia non portenta." He was the "superior fiend," a prodigy of wickedness, a fury of debauchery and blood. The French Court, in a former age, had endeavoured to get rid of its enemies after a treacherous peace by one widespreading massacre. With far less danger to the great principles which hold mankind together, Catholics had encountered Protestants, and Protestants Catholics, in the open field. A deluge of blood had been

(c) "Look in thy breast, most dirty Dean; be fair." Pope.

(d) Serjeant Maynard, after having voted the prosecution of Fitzharris illegal, on account of his impeachment, and those who concurred in it public enemies, appeared as one of the counsel against him.

(e) Hawles.

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shed to quench the flames of civil war. But it exemplifies the formal and prosaic genius of the English, that a series of murders, as horrible as ever were committed under the most raging tyrannies, were perpetrated by those who pretended to keep within the limits of the law. Cooped up within those narrow boundaries each party aimed the most deadly blows at the other with the same weapons and with the same effect. The lawyers were the ready accomplices of both. Instead of Monluc, Adrets, Montmorency, Coligni, Catherine de Medicis, and the Princes of the House of Lorraine, we had North, Williams, Maynard, Scroggs, Pemberton and Jeffreys; instead of Poltrot, Jacques Clement, and Ravaillac, we had the common law, our system of pleading, the rules of evidence (c), Titus Oates and his gang; instead of battles, captain's levies, and unscrupulous partizans, we had "forward sheriffs, bold witnesses, willing juries, and mercenary judges." Perjury on one side was avenged by perjury on the other. The slaughters perpetrated by a packed jury of Whigs were balanced by other slaughters perpetrated by a packed jury of Tories. The instruments of death, spies, suborners, informers, barristers, serjeants, judges, were the same, and the judicial murders of Coleman, Stayley, and Stafford, were redressed by the judicial murders of College, Russell, and Algernon Sydney. If it were not for the tragical nature of these scenes, and the disgrace they stamped on our national character, an observer might be amused at the identity of form and ceremonious usage employed first by one party, and then by its adversaries; at the monotonous uniformity in crime, the want of invention in wickedness, in which the English innovation-hating vulgar, who would have been scared by the least departure from precedent, and would have thought their constitution at an end, if the judge had appeared in Court out of his robes, were well contented to acquiesce.

(c) That is, whatever the judge on the Bench chose to call law, and in criminal cases there was no appeal.

The Tories received (c) with open arms the whole gang of miscreants who had destroyed their friends, and were now

(c) Butler, loyalist as he was, has described the age with his inimitable wit:

"Twice have men turned the world (that silly blockhead)

The wrong side outward, like a juggler's pocket,

Shook out hypocrisy as fast and loose

As e'er the Devil could teach, or sinners use;

And on the other side at once put in,

As impotent iniquity and sin.

For those who heretofore sought private holes
Securely in the dark to damn their souls,
Wore vizards of hypocrisy-to steal
And slink away in masquerade to Hell,
Now bring their crimes into the open sun,
For all mankind to gaze their worst upon,
As if the laws of Nature had been made
On purpose only to be disobeyed."

And then follow some noble lines which the reader will, I hope, thank me for quoting, which pay that homage to Greece and Rome which the truly great have always been ready to bestow, and shew how much better use the old philosophers made of their fantastic mythology than the northern nations have been able to do of the sublime precepts of Christian morality.

"So simple were those times-when a grave sage

Could, with an old wife's tale, instruct the age,
Teach virtue more fantastick ways and nice
Than ours will now endure t' improve in vice,
Made a dull sentence and a moral fable

Do more than all our holdings forth are able,
A forced, obscure mythology convince
Beyond our worst inflictions upon sins ;
When an old proverb or an end of verse
Could more than all our penal laws coerce,
And keep men honester than all the furies

Of jailors, judges, constables, and juries."

Compare the morality of Plato with that of Laud and his priests. The former drew all that was great in public, and good in private life from the mythology of his age; the latter made the Gospel itself a pretext for passive obedience and active persecution. The one turned darkness into

The

ready to destroy their enemies. College, a London joiner, notorious for his religious zeal, was the first object of their machinations. He had, with hundreds of his countrymen, been in Oxford, armed with sword and pistol, during the last Parliament, and this was the foundation of the charge against him. It was pretended that a conspiracy had been entered into to detain the King in custody until he should make the concessions demanded of him. The bill was first preferred before a London grand jury; they ignored the bill; another bill, to the same effect, was preferred in Oxfordshire, where Lord Norris, a courtier, was high sheriff. They returned it. College was in the Tower when the bill was found. Oxford gaoler, Morrell, and a messenger, Sewell, were sent to bring him down to Oxford (d). After they had taken him out of the Tower they "run him into a house," and there deprived him of all the notes and papers which he had drawn up for his defence, by order of the King's counsel. North was the instrument selected by the government to commit murder on this occasion, and he fulfilled the task assigned to him with more discretion than Scroggs, and equal punctuality. In vain did College, when brought before a packed jury and the servile bench, petition that his papers might be restored to him—in vain did he prove, by testimony clear as the noonday light, the perjury of each separate witness who was brought against him-in vain, though repeatedly, and most cruelly interrupted by Mr. Justice Jones (e), did he address the jury with spirit unbroken, and with reasons unanswerable. He was convicted, and when the verdict was brought in, the

light, and the other light into darkness. Heathen Greece (so glorious were the faculties of its inhabitants) produced Socrates and Phocion; Christian Europe produced bishops like Wren, politicians like Shaftesbury, judges like North.

(d) State Trials, vol. 8; State Tracts, vol. 2.

(e) He was, Roger North says, of "Welsh extraction," and subject to fits of passion, which displayed themselves, says that affected writer, "in a rubor of the face."

Oxford spectators, as savage on one side, as the London spectators had been on the other, set up a shout of applause. "The truth is," said Sir John Hawles, afterwards Solicitor General, "what College said was true; they took away all helps from him for defending himself, and, therefore, might as well have condemned him without a trial, notwithstanding all which the courage of the man never fainted; but after he was condemned, he boldly asked where he was to be executed." "He had, from the 18th of August, 1681, on which he was condemned, to the 31st, on which he was executed, a much longer time than was allowed my Lord Russell and many others, and the true reason of so long a reprieve was to see how the nation would digest the matter, and whether the man, by the terror of death, would be prevailed upon to become a tool to destroy other innocents; but when it was found that the people were quiet, and that the prisoner could not be prevailed upon to do an ill thing to save his life, his execution was ordered."

This was the lot of College, far more to be envied in his prison, unless the hope of the patriot is a dream, and the tools of the waster, created like the Emperor Nicholas to destroy, have chosen rightly,-not only than those who bore false witness. against him, and who speedily became the objects of universal execration and contempt, but than North, the more exalted agent of iniquity, who died with his mask on, amid the glare of wealth, covered with the trappings of those disgraceful honours, which he had bought with the blood of the innocent, and transmitting a name tainted with corruption to posterity. College did his duty to England, and to mankind; he is one of our murdered patriots, and though the patrician descent of Lord Russell, and the splendid qualities of Algernon Sydney, have cast his name into the shade, the Englishman who recollects that our liberties are owing far more to the stubborn resistance and fortitude of the many than to the genius or integrity of the few, will rejoice that the name of a soldier in