Cut off from empire, and no more a son!

"My father, whom with reverence yet I name,
Charm'd into ease, is careless of his fame;
And, bribed with petty sums of foreign gold,
Is grown in Bathsheba's embraces old.

He gives, and let him give, my right away,
But why should he his own, and your's betray?
He, only he, can make the nation bleed,

And he alone from my revenge is freed.

Take then my tears, with that he wip'd his eyes,
'Tis all the aid my present power supplies.
No court-informer can these arms accuse;

These arms may sons against their fathers use."

Of the fondness of Charles II for Monmouth a great number of instances may be found in the curious diary of Pepys. Pepys, a sort of Paul Pry, took particular notice of the coat of arms painted on the duke's coach, upon his marriage; he notices the arms quartered of England, Scotland, and France, but nothing to indicate illegitimacy. On another day he says "The Queen was at Windsor, at the late St. George's feast there; and the Duke of Monmouth dancing with her, with his hat in his hand. The King came in and kissed him, and made him put on his hat, which every body from this entertaining

took notice of." I should have cited diary, when mentioning the saving of spoons, that on one occasion Pepys says he went to be godfather, and took six silver spoons in his pocket; he gave the midwife 10s., the nurse 5s., the maid 2s. but, on finding that the child was not christened with his own name, he thought better of his present, and saved his spoons.

It was on the occasion of Monmouth's defeat at the battle of Sedgmoor in the next reign, that the horrible instance of Colonel Kirke's cruelty is related to have occurred ;-a young

woman consenting to dishonor in order to save her father's life, and afterwards taken to a window near which her father was hanging at a gibbet. The authenticity of the story was much doubted, in consequence of its not being noticed in Burnet's gossiping history. But, in the recent Oxford edition, printed from Burnet's MSS. these words occur, which were omitted in former editions." Some particulars relating to Kirke's military executions are too indecent to be related by me." The circumstance of young women marrying, or being on the point of marriage, against their inclinations, but in order to rescue a father from danger or difficulties, is a popular contrivance with English novelists.

Frederick the Great, when a young man, was imprisoned by his father, and was obliged, by his father's orders, to witness, from a window, the execution of an intimate friend; four grenadiers held his head towards the window. Frederick was dressed in the same prison dress as his unfortunate friend, and never could be prevailed upon to quit it, till it fell off him in rags. The scene is supposed to have occasioned the reluctance which Frederick felt, during his whole reign, to capital punishments. Frederick the Great was afterwards reconciled to his father, and directed the exact performance of all the singular orders which his father requested might be given regarding his funeral and funeral sermons; whereas his own desire to be buried in the garden of Sans Souci by the side of his dogs was not complied with. But his father's austerities, directed to make him believe in the evidences of Christianity, only gave him a greater zest, in after life, for the society of unbelievers who called themselves by the name of "The Friends of Truth." Frederick was always attached to his mother; wrote to her after all his great victories;

and in his History of the Seven Years' War he consecrates a long and eloquent passage to her memory.

Several memorable instances have occurred in history, in which filial piety has been assigned as a motive for very sanguinary acts, and in which personal revenge or fear may be thought the chief, if not the only incentive. Augustus sacrificed four hundred senators and equites at the altar of Julius Cæsar, who had adopted Augustus as his son; they were slain on the Ides of March, the anniversary of the day on which, according to the splendid lines of Akenside

Brutus rose

Refulgent from the stroke of Cæsar's fate,
Amid the crowd of patriots; and his arm
Aloft extending, like eternal Jove

When guilt brings down the thunder, call'd aloud
On Tully's name, and shook his crimson steel,
And bade the Father of his Country hail!
For lo! the tyrant prostrate in the dust,

And Rome again is free.

In like manner the savage executions of the Regicides after the Restoration will not be excused in Charles II by posterity. Even Milton, for whose apprehension a reward was offered, was only rescued from the hypocritical altar of filial piety by a mock funeral, and by an act of reciprocity on the part of the poet Davenant, whom he had saved in the time of the parliament. Milton's fine sonnet on "" Vane, young in years, but in sage counsels old," will always live in favorable contrast with Charles' letter to Clarendon, urging him "to get Vane out of the way." So his splendid Latin eulogy on Bradshaw will not be tarnished by the posthumous barbarities inflicted on the disinterred body of that great man who judged the perfidious Charles, and upbraided the grasping

R

Cromwell. It may be thought surprizing that the following lines in the Samson Agonistes should have escaped the Licencer who could espy a lurking mischief in the Eclipse, which, in the Paradise Lost, "with fear of change perplexes monarchs."

God of my fathers, what is man?

That thou towards him with hand so various,
Or might I say contrarious,

Temper❜st thy providence thro' this short course.
Not evenly, as thou rul'st

Th' angelic orders, and inferior creatures mute,

Irrational and brute.

Nor do I name of men the common rout,

That, wandering loose about,

Grow up and perish as the summer fly,
Heads without name, no more remember'd.
But such as thou hast solemnly elected,
With gifts and graces eminently adorned
To some great work, thy glory,

And people's safety, which in part they effect!

Yet, towards these thus dignify'd thou oft,

Amidst their height of noon,

Changest thy countenance and thy hand,

With no regard of highest favors past

From thee on them, or them to thee of service.

Nor only dost degrade them, or remit

To life obscur'd, which were a fair dismission,

But throw'st them lower than thou didst exalt them high;
Unseemly falls in human eye,

Too grievous for the trespass or omission.

Or leav'st them to the hostile sword

Of heathen and profane, their carcasses

To dogs and fowls a prey, or else captived;

Or to the unjust tribunals, under change of times,
And condemnation of th' ungrateful multitude.

In Archbishop Laud's Diary, which is an important document in the history of the country, there are some curious

entries that shew his superstition. The following instance is, however, pleasing, as it would seem to indicate that his early filial affection had not been completely stifled by his ambition, bigotry, and resentments. Jan. 5, Epiphany eve. In the night I dreamed that my mother, long since dead, stood by my bed, and drawing aside the clothes a little, looked pleasantly on me; and that I was glad to see her with so merry an aspect." Another Great Man may be thought to have sacrificed his life to his mother. I allude to Jack Sheppard, who, on account of his numerous escapes from pri. son, gave birth to a Pantomime, called " Harlequin Sheppard." His last and fatal apprehension was by means of an ale-house-boy, who gave information where he was. He had treated his mother with part of three quarterns of brandy at the Sheers ale-house, in Maypole alley by Clare market. Poor Jack Sheppard was himself so drunk, that he was unable to make any resistance, and so he was conveyed in a coach to Newgate.

A learned and entertaining production in our literature is Swift's Tale of a Tub, in which the three brothers Peter, Martin, and Jack, (representing the Pope, Lutherans and Calvinists,) discuss the terms of their father's will (the Scriptures) touching the wearing and management of certain coats which he bequeathed to them respectively. Fashion, in the first instance, prompts them to add shoulder-knots to their coats; for these there is no authority in the will totidem verbis or syllabis; but they make out shoulder-knots, totidem literis, at least by an ingenious argument for dispensing with the letter k, which was not found in the whole will. They make out other innovations to be admissible jure paterno, some by introducing what they heard their father's man say their