his body, for who can expect a jewel in the head of a toad ?" And now for his parting knell, rang out by Captain Gwynn "He's a sort of devil, whose pride's so vast, As he were thrown beyond Lucifer's cast, Which, no doubt, were thought pretty, pious lines at the time. But so long as the world lasts, echo can never cease repeating, that "The evil men do lives after them." And the very worst of Cromwell's legacy of evils that survived him, was unquestionably the passiveness of the nation-from sheer political exhaustion-under the scandalous influence of the profligate, careless, and bankrupt court of Charles the Second, which can only be accounted for, by the striking contrast of its dead and stagnant calm being considered perfectly halcyon, after the devastating hurricanes and ceaseless hurley-burleys of the Protectorate. On this account, perhaps, all might be condoned, but for the atrocious Rye House plot-sham trials-"Damned to everlasting fame"-by being indelibly written in the pure, untainted blood of William Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney. Charles's relentless injustice on this occasion, indeed, brought forth, in a way never to be forgotten, the hereditary sanguinary hardness of heart, which has rendered the archives of the Stuarts so infamous. We must likewise remember that we also owe to Cromwell the glorious Revolution of 1688, as but for the vivid recollection of the horrors that desecrated the first pages of the history of the Commonwealth, we never should have had it. And one's sense of outraged justice, in the Second Charles having escaped the penalties of his misdeeds, is very satisfactorily healed by the knowledge that his brother James smarted for them. And yet, detestable and contemptible as James the Second was, upon every score, still there are certain phases in his fate which make one pity him, not exactly with the pity that is akin to love; or if it is, it is only a very distant relation, indeed-say a mother-in-law. But one really does pity him, when one thinks of his horrible wife - that trafficker in human beings, who, in return for the height to which he had raised her, and the rod of iron with which she ruled him, had never, from a very early stage of their marriage, been even faithful to him. Then worse than all, was his horrible and unnatural daughter, Mary, wife of William the Third, who, to increase her own and her husband's power, did all she could to ruin and destroy her father. However, given-a scion of a thoroughly worldly self-seeking climbing race, and what crime is there before which they will recoil in their avocation of "rising in the world,” short of those of which the law takes cognizance, which are by no means the worst; for what is the murder of a body, whose pangs are ended in a few minutes, compared to one of those subtle, occult, moral murders, including the wreck of all that rightly constituted human beings value, and extending over the dreary arid waste of a whole existence? Yet these cruel and dastardly moral murders, intangible to the law, are what our "more than kin and less than kind," so often perpetrate, as did James the Second's, perhaps very queenly-for her mother had play'd at royalty before her-but certainly unwomanly daughter committed upon him? Then, again, we must contemplate the poor old royal pauper, shivering over the cold charity of the "Grand Monarque," at St. Germain en Laye, where he was so cruelly stinted in fire wood; your very great people, when they set about it, being able to achieve such very great meannesses, which humble mortals would not even be able to conceive. Now in this freezing phase of James the Second's punishment, there was evidently no retributive justice; as everyone knows, he would freely have supplied the greater portion of his former subjects with an ad libitum quantum of fire and faggot. Before concluding this chapter, I have one protest to make, and that is against its being supposed that, by placing Sir Allen Broderick in juxtaposition with "The Lord Protector," I mean either to whitewash the moral crooked lanes and blind alleys of the former, or to defend the lesser rascal by the example of the greater. Nothing of the kind, and be it understood, that I merely use the relative term of lesser and greater with reference to Sir Allen's lesser career, and his having a more circumscribed sphere for his equally unscrupulous talents, which after all, is the real stuff that goes to the manufacture of your "great men," ancient or modern-at least, what are called such, which is very different from the genuine article, according to the Cornelius Nepos pattern, those who have pride in belonging to that very small minority, whose maxim is Magnos homines virtute, metimur non fortunâ.” Indeed, as the world is at present constituted, knowing by what means success is generally achieved, I have not only no worship and no admiration for the successful, but on the contrary, a strong suspicion of them, closely allied to contempt. CHAPTER VII. GILBERT MAKES A SIGN. T was the very end of October; the year had arrived, not only at "the last rose," but at the last leaf of summer. Mrs. Neville and Dorothy had left The Chestnuts, and were again domiciled in the house on the Mall; for the latter had let the house in St. James's Street, which her grandfather had left her, and her tenant was no less a personage than Sir Angus Tullibardin, whose object in taking it for a term of seven years, we are bound to confess, was a firm conviction, duly fostered by his aunt Mrs. Alice Throckmorton, that in hiring the house he should be able to win the owner; and in this hope, or rather certainty! he had taken care to monté it in all the taste of the newest fashion, and to keep a large establishment of "demmed vairlets," both in livery and out. Yet, alas! for the bad taste of Mistress Dorothy, since September he had actually been refused twice; nathless, Sir Augus ne se tenait pas pour battu, for, as he observed to his aunt |