inscription attributing the firing of the City to the Papists, had been carefully obliterated; Monks began to appear at Whitehall in the habit of their respective orders; the King appointed none but Catholics to situations of trust and emolument; and he had more than doubled the standing army, which, at a time of profound peace, could have no other object than the dragooning of his subjects into the forcible adoption of his own faith, or the infliction

upon

them

of the same military persecution which the Protestants of France were at that moment enduring from their Catholic monarch. Stimulated by these corroborating appearances, all his ter ror of Popish plots revived with tenfold force. Every night that passed over without an explosion or a massacre, only convinced him the more that the next was reserved for those inevitable horrors, so that it was some relief to his mind to escape from London, although he was the bearer of such heart-rending tidings into Dorsetshire. From the moment of his arrival in the capital he had worn his impenetrable silken shirt, and carried his Protestant flail under his

coat, defences which he scrupulously retained upon his journey, sitting bolt upright in his panoply, to his prodigious personal discomfort, and suffering an acute anguish of mind, not only from his individual distress on his nephew's account, but from his despondency at the fate with which the whole country was menaced from the bigotry of its King. In this bristling array, and with such disconsolate thoughts, he travelled back in a forlorn silence, not once ejaculating a single "hem" of complacency; not once attempting to sweeten his imagination by a reference to the palatable contents of his waistcoat pocket.

Reuben, in the meanwhile, remained a prey to equal misery of mind in the wretched gaol of Lyme, which was at that time crowded with prisoners, and totally deficient in most of the accommodations that might minister to their comfort. To these external hardships he was indeed indifferent, but he found it difficult at first to support the contending emotions struggling within him. Of preserving his life he did not entertain the remotest hope. The recollection of the prominent part he had acted, and

of the fate remorselessly inflicted upon all those of the same rank who had been hitherto arrested, forbade him to turn his thoughts in that direc tion. It was not death that he feared, but it mortified him to reflect that after all his resolutions to sell his life dearly, rather than suffer himself to be apprehended, he should have been surprized and captured by means of an ignorant peasant woman. He was about to die, too, when his existence was becoming doubly dear and delightful, from the delicious thought that at some future period it might be blessed by the society of the noble-minded Helen. Over this hope, shadowy and distant as it might be, his heart had brooded with all the deep and intense worship of a first love, exalted by gratitude, and secretly cherished in an enthusiastic bosom. It had given a new feeling, a new character, a new aspiration to his soul; and to be suddenly wrenched and torn away from the contemplation of such a boundless felicity, to be driven from a world which the possession of her affections I would have rendered so ineffably glorious and enchanting, he felt to be a disruption much

more terrible than the mere parting with life. To his lost parents, also, his thoughts often reverted, and ever with an increasing pang of pious anguish that his career upon earth should be thus ignominiously cut short, ere he had accomplished that which he had fondly believed to be his destiny, and which, at all events, it had been the solemn determination of his soul to fulfil—a

voyage to India for the purpose of attempting

the elucidation of their fate. To another would now belong the glory of rescuing them, if, as he firmly believed, they were still living upon some remote, unvisited shore; and tears of filial remorse gushed from his eyes as he reflected that his precipitation had not only withdrawn him from the performance of this imperative duty, but would leave the disgrace of his public execution as a criminal to overwhelm them with confusion upon their return to their native land. Independently of these considerations, he was neither afraid to die, nor ashamed of expiring upon a scaffold, for he gloried in the cause for which he was to suffer, and was resolved not to disgrace it in his last moments. Although he

could not emulate them in his life or talents, he might at least humbly imitate the firmness of Russel and Sydney, of whose execution he had received such a minute account from the stern old republican Malachi Wardrop: nay, he was resolved to avow his principles at once in open court, to impeach the King of having violated his oath and his duty, and to call upon his fellow-countrymen with his last breath never to abandon the sacred cause of civil and religious liberty, never to renounce the right of an armed resistance to illegal and arbitrary power.

His fellow-prisoners were not of a description to withdraw him by their society from the contemplation of his miserable situation; for they were mostly poor ignorant rustics, or others of the lowest class, who had been engaged in the rebellion, and were waiting the arrival of a vessel to transport them to New England. During the day-time they were allowed to amuse or exercise themselves in the court-yard, when Reuben, glad to escape from their clamour and tumult, generally chose to remain in the ward