tressed to state, is exceedingly unfavorable. | sprung from latent insanity, not from preThough the disorder of the faculties may meditated and conscious wickedness, not have been more rapidly developed by recent from the frivolity and defiance of an utterly occurrences, he does not consider it a tem- callous heart, not from the deliberate sugporary one, but arising from organic de- gestions of an abandoned nature. From an rangement, and therefore of a permanent object of unavoidable disgust and hatred, and incurable character. He pronounces it my unfortunate boy was converted into a to be a softening of the brain, a defect which claimant for the profoundest pity and comgradually undermines the reasoning powers, passion. It was something to feel that I and usually terminates in imbecility and idi- still had a son, even though he might be litocy. On my hinting that his patient was by tle better than a filial statue. no means a harmless simpleton, but had recently been harboring heinous designs, he replied that a combination of cunning and contrivance with great wickedness frequently characterized the incipient stages of this peculiar lunacy; and that, from the present condition of your son, he had no hesitation in declaring he must have been in an unsound state of mind for several months. Depend upon it,' such were the physician's own words, that this unfortunate young man, though he may have been competent to the ordinary purposes of life, has long been utterly defective in the moral sense; has ceased to know the difference between right and wrong, and cannot, therefore, during this period of morbid mental action, be fairly deemed an accountable being.' "I have placed poor George for the present in a private lunatic asylum, and await your orders as to his ultimate disposal." CHAPTER XV. SAD and afflicting as it was, I have said that this letter was not without mitigating suggestions. It is a great, a deplorable, a heart-rending calamity to be the father of an incurable idiot; but it is infinitely more terrible to have a son who could contemplate, while in possession of his reason, the diabolical crime of parricide. From this horror and disgrace I was relieved. My heart was enabled to throw off the incubus that had darkened and crushed it. All was now cleared up, every thing was now intelligible, and my misfortune, though still a heavy one, was not tainted by the unutterably hateful associations with which I had been previously haunted. My son's dabblings with the poisonous mixture-the monomania which stimulated his horrible purpose-his reckless conduct-his heartless levity of tongue, when he should rather have been overwhelmed with shame and sorrow-and the vacant, misplaced, offensive laugh by which I had so often been revolted-all had now received a solution which showed them to have Although Hodges the foreman, had strict moral justice been awarded him, deserved punishment rather than reward, I had made him a promise which I held myself sacredly bound to perform. Removing him, accordingly, from a neighborhood where he might have been tempted to a renewal of his unhallowed practices, I purchased for him in a provincial town a long-established and respectable business, by attention to which he cannot fail to realize a moderate independ ence. More than a year has elapsed since the occurrence of the events stated in the preceding narrative; and though I have no further marvelous adventures to record, the interval has not been altogether uneventful. Godfrey Thorpe, after having run through his own fine fortune by every species of wanton extravagance, lived for some time upon the fortunes of others by running in debt, when,. being unable to protract any longer the smash I had anticipated, he absconded from the seat of his ancestors, and is at present settled with his family at Boulogne. Oakfield Hall, with its wide and fair domains, is now mine, and I am writing in the library of that Elizabethan mansion of which I had so long coveted the possession. Many of my fond and foolish yearnings have been chastised by my temporary consignment to the jaws of death; but this ambition, perhaps the vainest of my earthly vanities, has survived my apparent decease and real entombment, and I feel a daily and increasing pleasure as I wander over my broad acres. are my rides less gratifying because I take them on my favorite white cob, whose back I never again expected to bestride when I caught a glimpse of him as the undertakers were depositing me in my coffin. Nor My daughter's marriage was solemnized a year ago, and I am already blessed with a little grandson, who bears my name, and who will become my heir. Mr. Mason, for whom I have purchased the advowson of the living, and who, conjointly with his wife, does the honors of Oakfield Hall, where they are permanently established, devotes himself with an exemplary zeal to the discharge of his pastoral duties, and is beloved by the whole neighborhood. Their union promises to be more than usually blessed; a prospect which affords me the purest and most exquisite of all pleasures-the contemplation of that happiness which we have been instrumen tal in conferring upon others, My poor son, whom I regularly see, though he no longer recognizes me, is in a private asylum for lunatics, where he receives every succor and consolation that his unfortunate state allows. All hopes of his recovery have long been abandoned. LORD WILLIAM RUSSELL. LORD WILLIAM RUSSELL was the third son of the first, Duke of Bedford, and a distinguished supporter of Liberty, was born about 1641. He was educated in the principles of constitutional freedom espoused by his father, and yielded to the vortex of dissipation introduced by the restoration, until his marriage with Rachel, second daughter and co-heiress of the earl of Southampton (then widow of lord Vaughan), which wholly reclaimed him He represented the county of Bedford in four parliaments, and, being highly esteemed for patriotism and independence, was regarded as one of the heads of the whig party. When Charles II., exasperated at the court of France for withdrawing his pension, appeared desirous of joining the continental confederacy against Louis XIV., a French war being generally popular in England, the parliament voted a large supply of men and money. The whigs, aware of the king's character, dreading to give him an army, which might as probably be employed against liberty at home as against France, opposed the measure. This movement being acceptable to the French king, an intrigue commenced between the leading whigs and Barillon, the French ambassador, the consequence of which was the receipt, on the part of some of them, of pecuniary assistance, in order to thwart the intended war. From that minister's private despatches, sir John Dalrymple, in his Memoirs of Great Britain, has published a list of those persons; but lords Russell and Holland are specified as refusing to receive money on this account. In 1679, when Charles II found it necessary to ingratiate him' self with the whigs, lord Russell was appointed one of the members of the privy council. He soon, however, found that his party was not in the king's confidence, and the recall of the duke of York, without their concurrence, induced him to resign. Although his temper was mild and moderate, his tear of a Catholic succession induced him to take decisive steps in the promotion of the exclusion of the duke of York. In June, 1680, he went publicly to Westminster-hall, and, at the court of king's bench, presented the duke as a recusant; and, on the November following, carried up the exclusion bill to the house of lords, at the head of two hundred members of parliament. The king dissolved the parliament, and resolved thenceforward to govern without one; and arbitrary principles were openly avowed by the partisans of the court. Alarmed at the state of things, many of the whig leaders favored strong expedients, in the way of counteraction, and a plan of insurrection was formed for a simultaneous rising in England and Scotland. Among these leaders, including the dukes of Monmouth and Argyle, the lords Russell, Essex, and Howard, Algernon Sidney and Hampden, different views prevailed; but lord Russell looked only to the exclusion of the duke of York. While these plans were ripening, a subaltern plot was laid by some inferior conspirators, for assassinating the king on his return from Newmarket, at a farm called the Ryehouse, which gave a name to the conspiracy. Although this plan was not connected with the scheme of the insurrection, the detection of the one led to that of the other, and lord Russell, was in consequence, committed to the Tower. After some of the Ryehouse conspirators had been executed, advantage was taken of the national feeling to bring him to trial, in July, 1683; and pains being taken to pack a jury of partisans, he was, after very little deliberation, brought in guilty of high treason. "It was proved," says Hume, "that the insurrection had been deliberated on by the prisoner; the surprisal of the guards deliberated, but not fully resolved upon; and that an assassination of the king had not been once mentioned or imagined by him. The law was on this occasion stretched to the prisoner's destruction, and his condemnation was deemed illegal by judge Atkins and many other authorities, not to dwell on the act which on this ground reversed his attainder. Once condemned, such a victim was too agreeable to the court, and to the vindictive feelings of the duke of York, to meet with mercy; and the offer of a large sum of money from his father, whose only son he had now become, to the duchess of Portsmouth, and the pathetic solicitations of his wife, proved in vain, and he obtained remission only of the more ignominious parts of his sentence. He was too firm to be induced by the divines, who attended him, to subscribe to the doctrine of non-resistance, then the favorite court tenet of the day; and it is to be regretted that he was induced to write a petitionary letter to the duke of York, promising to forbear all future opposition, and to live abroad, should his life be spared. It is presumed that this letter was written in compliance with the solicitations of his friends, for he nobly refused the generous offer of lord Cavendish to favor his escape by exchanging clothes; and, with equal generosity declined the proposal of the duke of Monmouth (q. v.) to deliver himself up, if he thought the step would be serviceable to him. Conjugal affection was the feeling that clung closest to his heart; and when he had taken the last farewell of his wife, he exclaimed, that the bitterness of death was past. He was beheaded in Lincoln's-inn fields, July 21, 1683, in the forty-second year of his age. To the character of this regretted nobleman for probity, sincerity, and private worth, even the enemies to his public principles have borne ample testimony. Of his talents, Burnet observes that he was of a slow, but sound understanding.-Lady Rachel Russell, his wife, by the affectionate zeal with which she assisted her husband, and the magnanimity with which she bore his loss, obtained the respect and admiration of the world. Upon his trial, she accompanied him into court, and when he was refused counsel, and allowed only an amanuensis, she stood forth as that assistant, and excited the respect and sympathy of all who be held her. After his death, she wrote a touching letter to the king, in which she asserted that the paper delivered by him to the sheriff, declaratory of his innocence, was his own composition, and not, as charged by the court, dictated by any other person. She spent the remainder of her life in the exercise of pious and social duties. A collection of her letters was published in 1775 (4to.). Lord John Russell has written a life of lord William Russell This exemplary woman died in 1723, aged eighty-seven. |