ment was perfect; till the passing of the act of oblivion, in the exceptions of which he was not comprehended, ascertained his safety and re-instated him in society.

To whom he was indebted on this emergency for his preservation, has frequently been inquired, and has variously been explained. The forgetfulness or the clemency of Charles must necessarily be thrown out of the question; for of the former his benefactors only were the objects, and of the latter, those alone whom his prudence or his want of power prohibited him to punish. To what cause, then, are we to ascribe the impunity of Milton? In some points of view, his of fence might be regarded as greater even than that of the immediate regicides; for they had only murdered the king, while he had insulted the office; their act was confined in its consequences to a small compass of time and of place, while his extended to unborn generations and touched the extremities of Europe. His guilt therefore, as we may be certain,

This story reminds us of the following lines of the Epigrammatist: but the suicide of Fannius was real, while that of Milton was happily fictitious.

Hostem cum fugeret, se Fannius ipse peremit.

Hic, rogo, non furor est ne moriare mori?

Mart. ii. 80.

could not be pardoned without powerful intercession. We may conclude that his friend, Andrew Marvell, the member for Hull, made what interest for him he could in the House; and we are told that Sir Thomas Clarges united his exertions with those of Secretary Morrice for the preservation of this valuable life. But Milton seems to have been saved principally by the earnest and grateful interposition of Sir William D'Avenant. When D'Avenant, who had been captured by the fleet of the Commonwealth on his passage from France to America, had been ordered by the Parliament, in 1651, to his trial before the High Court of Justice, the mediation of Milton had essentially contributed to snatch him from his danger; and, urged by that generous benevolence which shone conspicuously in his character, he was now eager to requite with a gift of equal value the life which he had received. For the existence of D'Avenant's obligation to Milton we have the testimony of Wood; and for the subsequent part of a story, so interesting in itself and so honourable to human nature, the evidence is distinctly and directly to be traced in its ascent from Richardson to Pope, and

* Athene Oxon. ii. 412.

from Pope to Betterton, the immediate client and intimate of D'Avenant.

On the passing of the Act of Oblivion,* in the full grace of which he found himself included," Milton left the retirement, where he had continued for nearly four months; and in which he had heard himself made by a vote of the Commons the object of a public prosecu

On the 29th of August.

b John Goodwin, a divine and a writer of no celebrity, who had justified, without ability or effect, the murder of the king, was not beneath the condescension of this act of the legislature. He was incapacitated by it from holding any public office: and he is said to have owed his life only to the circumstance of his Arminian principles, which had conciliated the favour of some of the leading clergy of the church of England. His obnoxious work, which was called "The Obstructors of Justice," had the honour of burning with Milton's superior publications.

Verum idem ex animo, (says Isaac Vossius speaking of Salmasius, in a letter to N. Heinsius, from Stockholm, dated on the 5th of April, 1651) gaudet librum Miltoni Lutetiæ publicè a carnifice esse combustum. Non opus est ut meum de hoc scripto interponam judicium: interim hoc scio, fatum esse bonorum ferè librorum, ut hoc modo vel pereant vel periclitentur. Homines plerumque propter scelera et pravitatem manus carnificum subeunt, libri vero virtutis et præstantiæ ergo. Soli fatuorum labores tales non metuunt casus, Sed sanè frustrà sunt, qui se hoc modo ex. stirpare posse existimant Miltoni et aliorum scripta, cum potius flammis istis mirum quantum clarescant et illustrentur. [Burm. Syll. iii. 621.] These are the remarks of a man who was sensible not only of the merit of Milton's work, but of the impo. tence of that vengeance, which the enemies of its great author attempted by this measure to inflict on it. By what caprice or mistake could Isaac Vossius be promoted in our church by the same hands which raised the dirty Du Moulin to one of its dignities?

tion, and his two great political works, the "Iconoclastes" and the "Defence of the People of England," condemned to be burnt by the hands of the hangman. By this last species of insult, he was probably no more affected on the present occasion than he had formerly been by its infliction on one of the same publications at Toulouse and at Paris: and he probably also only smiled when, for the purpose of increasing his unpopularity and, of course, his danger at this delicate crisis of his fortune, the malignity of his enemies published the abuse and calumnies which had been vented against him by the dying Salmasius. But those scenes of sanguinary execution,

I must here, with some shame and much regret, remark a circumstance which favourably distinguished the usurping government from the regular monarchy. During the usurpation men had been convicted of high treason, (for the Courts had properly determined that attempts against the actual representative of the state, (by whatever title he was called,) were high treason, but simple death was the utmost infliction; and the axe or the halter put the speediest period to the existence of the criminal. But on the restoration of the monarchy, the old barbarity of the law was admitted in its full horror. Men were quartered alive the bowels were torn from the yet breathing sufferer, and the public feeling was either disgusted or hardened by the spectacle of torture and ferocious punishment. The infliction of this abominable sentence in its full rigour is now, in fact, prohibited by the general sense of the community: but much, of course, must still be left to the discretion of the sheriff and the executioner. The correspondent punishment for females, that I mean of burning alive, has very properly been abolished by an act of

which he was soon destined to witness, must have carried the wound immediately to his heart.

That the clemency of Charles should be the theme of lavish panegyric with contemporary loyalty ought not possibly to excite our surprise: but, with reference to him, the time has long since elapsed in which praise, unsupported by truth, can be admitted on the plea of passion. If we reflect that Charles was not now reclaiming his royal rights as a con

our Legislature in the 30th year of the present reign and it is to be hoped that this ferocious punishment of quartering alive, will not be suffered much longer to pollute the pages of our criminal code. No man can deplore with more genuine sensibility than myself the sanguinary excesses and the opprobrious result of the French revolution: but when I reflect that it has banished the rack and the wheel, the red-hot pincers and the dismembering horse, I cannot forbear from thinking that it has made a considerable compensation to human nature for any violences which, in the paroxysm of its phrenzy, it may have offered to her.

Since this note was in print, it has been suggested to me that the use of torture, for extorting confession, has been revived in France. With the dreadful secrets of the dungeons of resuscitated despotism I pretend not to be acquainted; but no public exhibition or avowal of torture has yet shocked the community of France. The re-establishment however of this cruel and atrocious practice cannot be regarded as improbable in the new empire of the French; and, with the renovation of the slave trade and of negro slavery in the West Indies, it will form an act of legislation well worthy, in its double reference to humanity and to political wisdom, of the new imperial government of the august Buonapartes.