—but hardly treasonous. And Raleigh denied them. They were contained in a paper, purporting to be Lord Cobham's confession. Sir Edward Coke pleaded against him in a style worthy of Jeffreys; heaping upon the accused the foulest epithets, which he only replied to by an indignant and scornful silence. The charge founded on Lord Cobham's confession, it was necessary to rebut in a different way-and for this he was prepared. Cobham and the other rebels were also confined in the Beauchamp-tower; and before the trial, Raleigh, expecting to be charged as an accomplice, because one of them was his friend, had procured from Cobham a written statement, in which his ignorance of the whole affair was fully set forth. Not a vestige of evidence against him remained-yet the court pronounced sentence of death! That he would be executed, no one believed; that he would be kept in confinement, no one for a moment expected. But he was. Between twelve and thirteen years he was detained in the Tower; his noble-hearted wife sharing his imprisonment. His intercourse with the outer world was not cut off he corresponded with the young Prince Henry, to whom he was tenderly attached; and he sometimes received in his cell visits from the most learned and celebrated men of his time.

His great

solace, however, was writing: here he conceived and commenced that gigantic task, The History of the World; a work replete with great thoughts worthily expressed. The preface to it is one of the noblest pieces of writing in the English language.

How true and touching is the image which he uses, when speaking of the reception which his book may meet with from the public-"The general acceptance can yield me no other profit, at this time, than doth a fair sunshine day to a seaman after shipwreck; and the contrary, no other harm than an outrageous tempest after the port attained." How solid and how noble is the moral of the entire theme-" Kings live in the world and not above it;" the curse which men in power bring down upon themselves when they set the example of blood-shedding; the Nemesis which awaits on all great crimes!

How Raleigh was at length liberated-how he was made lord-admiral and sent on a voyage of discovery-how he chastised the insolence of Spainhow Gondomar intrigued against him-and how his pusillanimous and cruel sovereign put him to death, without trial or crime brought home to him, under the flagitious sentence procured against him so many years before, for which he had suffered already more than a dozen years' confinement-how he died in Palace-yard like a hero and a martyr,-all this is well known to every reader of our country's annals.

Between Beauchamp-tower and the Devereuxtower, and under the latter, stands the low, melancholy church of St. Peter-ad-Vincula. In it are laid the ashes of some of the many victims of the headsman-martyrs and heroes, spotless women and unscrupulous statesmen, generals of armies and leaders of senates! Here for a time lay the headless trunk of the wise and witty chancellor of England, Sir

The

Thomas More, until the prayers of his devoted daughter, Margaret, succeeded in melting even the callous heart of the tyrant king; when it was allowed to be removed to Chelsea church, where it yet remains. By the same grave still rests his fellow in misfortune, the good Bishop of Rochester, John Fisher. Here, too, lies the dust of the unhappy queens, Ann Boleyn and Catharine Howard; and, hardly less noteworthy for the moral of their fates, the ashes of Lord and Lady Rochford, separated in their lives, united in their deaths. Poor George, Lord Rochford, brother to Queen Ann Boleyn, was involved in the accusation of his royal relative; and, in a great measure through the intrigues of his own infamous wife, both sister and brother were brought to the block. Her triumph was of short duration. demon that awaits on all unnatural crimes walked with her in her evil course. She became the witness, if not the tempter, to the conjugal infidelities of Catharine Howard; and five years after her husband's death, she too was taken to the scaffold, to suffer the same hard fate. Here also lies the mangled corpse of Margaret, the last of the Plantagenets! In one spot is buried Thomas Cromwell, the famous Earl of Essex, and the greatest statesman of his age; in another, Thomas Seymour, of Sudely, Lord High Admiral of England, sent to the block by his own brother, the Lord Protector Somerset (the judicial murderer of the great Earl of Surrey). Between the graves of the two queens of Henry VIII. lie the remains of the Protector himself, sent to the block

within three years of his brother's death; and of his rival and murderer, John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, sent to the same block within another year and a half. How swift and sure the Nemesis of political crime did its work of retribution! Here lie also the headless bodies of Guilford Dudley and Jane Grey. Not far from these, may be seen the graves of Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, the lover of the Queen of Scots; and of his son Philip, Earl of Arundel. Here also lies another famous Earl of Essex, the princely favourite of Elizabeth, Robert Devereux. What a history, and what a fate, were his! Here, too, under the communion-table, rest the ashes of James, Duke of Monmouth. His was the crime of mere vulgar ambition; he played for a high stake his head against a crown-and he lost. He has our pity, but neither our sympathy nor our respect. Not so another tenant of this melancholy sepulchre John Eliot, the wit, the orator, the patriot, the friend of Hampden, and the foe of Charles. Sir John Eliot was one of the first and firmest asserters of public liberty, against the tyrannous proceedings of Charles Stuart and his minions : even in a camp which held such men as Pym and Glanville, Hampden and Digges, Selden and Holles, -all men of great learning and eloquence,—Eliot still held the foremost place. His speech against the Duke of Buckingham is still regarded as one of the grandest charges ever delivered in the English parliament. The parallel between Villiers and Sejanus is a master stroke. "What!" said the startled king,

"if Buckingham be Sejanus, I must be the Tiberius !" The inference was obvious enough; a Stuart even could hardly misunderstand it. Before Sir John had left the house, a messenger beckoned him to the door, and he found himself under arrest : he was at once committed to the Tower. As the too successful orator was being carried off to prison, Charles himself entered the house, greatly agitated, and declared that he had taken care to punish some insolent speeches which they had lately heard, and plainly intimated that he should suffer no such boldness for the future. While in confinement, promises and menaces were alternately employed by the court to induce the patriot to acknowledge the prerogatives claimed by the sovereign; but in vain. On the eve of a general election, the prisons were all emptied of political offenders; and amongst others of Eliot, Hampden, Wentworth, and Hotham. This act of grace was expected to mollify the Commons, and to inspire the constituencies with confidence in the court. It produced neither one effect nor the other. The men who had been cast into foul dungeons for saying and doing such things as their ancestors had been in the habit of saying and doing for centuries, were not likely to regard the enemies of their country's liberty with more favour in consequence of an amnesty dictated by selfish considerations: and as to the people, the points in dispute between them and the king were not of that sentimental sort which can be removed by a mere trick of state craft. The court was still obstinate, the Commons still firm. Eliot was