general authenticity of Barillon's statements, his fidelity may be fairly questioned, in a case where he was doubly interested to deceive. He might at once be induced to enhance the importance of his own services, by including such a man as Algernon Sydney amongst his adherents; and to charge, as the price of his engagement, sums which had been otherwise appropriated: a suspicion which derives additional weight from two passages in the Letters of Madame de Sevigné, where he is said to have grown rich in his employ.

"Or, if Sydney received money from this minister, it was doubtless for some public purpose, as he is understood to have made occasional disbursements among his own inferior partizans. Even on this less probable view of the subject, his character may be free from stain; unless it be received as an indisputable maxim, that, in resisting the oppression of an arbitrary government, it is immoral to accept of foreign aid. In the general conduct of nations, it has rarely happened, that the best purposes have been effected by the exertions of the pure and well-principled alone; and a man like Sydney should not be too harshly censured, if, in endeavouring to maintain his country's freedom, he occasionally sought for, or derived assistance from, less disinterested and ingenuous minds.

6

"Of the arrogant pretensions of Barillon, Sydney had been long aware; and, in alluding to his mistaken views of his own influence, had spoken of him to Savile in the language of unfeigned contempt. 'You know,' said he, July 10, 1679, Monsieur de Barillon governs us, if he be not mistaken; but he seems not to be so much pleased with that, as to find his embonpoint increased, by the moistness of our air, by frequently clapping his hands upon his thighs, showing the delight he hath in the sharpness of the sound, that testifies the plumpness and hardness of his flesh; and certainly, if this climate did not nourish him better than any other, the hairs of his nose, and nails of his fingers, could not grow so fast, as to furnish enough of the one to pull out, and of the other to cut off, in all companies, which being done, he picks his ears with as good a grace as my Lord La.' It is probable, therefore, that Sydney merely tolerated the intercourse of this minister, without entering into any of his views of policy, as they regarded the interest of France alone."

We must now hasten over some lesser incidents in Sydney's life, to notice, in a few words, his arrest, trial, and execution, in 1683, on the pretence of his being concerned in the Rye-house plot, a scheme for the assassination of the king and the duke of York, on their return from Newmarket. He was brought to trial soon after sentence had been pronounced on Lord William Russell, and though no evidence appeared against him, the bloody Jefferies did not hesitate to convict him of a specific charge on the testimony of his unuttered and unpublished thoughts and opinions, as gathered from his manuscripts which were seized. Sydney defended himself with undaunted fortitude, and in the short interval between his trial and execution, drew up an appeal to posterity on the injustice of his fate. How well that appeal has been responded to let the oft-repeated popular sentiment bear witness-"The cause for which Hampden bled in the field, and Russell and Sydney on the scaffold !"

On the morning of the 7th of December, he was led forth to the

place of execution on Tower-hill. He ascended the scaffold with a firm step and undaunted mien. Having made the necessary prepara tions, he kneeled down, and after a solemn pause of a few moments, calmly laid his head upon the block. Being asked by the executioner if he should rise again, he instantly replied, "Not till the general resurrection.-Strike on!" The executioner obeyed the mandate, and severed his head from his body at a blow.

Finch, Earl of Nottingham.

BORN A. D. 1621.-Died A. D. 1682.

HENEAGE FINCH, one of the best lawyers on the side of the court during the contest with the parliament, was born on the 23d of December, 1621. His father was speaker of the house of commons in the first parliament of Charles I. Heneage was educated at Westminster and Christ church. He studied law in the Inner Temple, and soon acquired a very extensive practice as chamber-counsel; to which line he prudently confined himself during the domination of the commonwealth-men.

Immediately after the Restoration, he was named solicitor-general. In April, 1661, he was elected to serve in parliament for the university of Oxford. His career in the house was as unpopular as high church and royal prerogative principles could make it; but it served to secure for him the confidence of the king. On the 9th of November, 1673, he was made keeper of the great seal, upon the dismissal of Shaftesbury. On the 10th of the succeeding January, the title of Baron Finch of Daventry, in the county of Northampton, was conferred on him; and in December, 1675, he received the title of lord-highchancellor. On the 12th of May, 1681, he was raised to the dignity of earl of Nottingham. He died in the following year.

To the above bare chronological outline little can be added. Finch was a good lawyer, and a discreet man, but he neither possessed nor advanced pretensions to the character of a leader in the troublous times in which his lot was cast. Lord Orford says of him, and with justice, that he was a great temporiser.' Yet Burnet allows that he was 'a man of probity, and well versed in the laws.' The truth seems to be that where interest did not intervene, Finch, like most other men moving in the eyes of the public, acted circumspectly and with a due regard to the laws which he was appointed to administer; but we can discover no traces in his history and character of that intrepid virtue which distinguished so many of his political and professional contemporaries. His speech, on passing judgment on Lord Stafford, would alone suffice, if no other evidence of the fact was on record, to show that his mind was under some of the worst influences which a servant of the crown is exposed to. His speeches and discourses on the trials of the regicides might also be referred to in proof of the same remark.

Lord Guilford.

BORN A. D. 1640.-DIED A. d. 1685.

FRANCIS NORTH, afterwards Baron Guilford, and lord-keeper of the great seal, was the second son of Dudley, Lord North. His earliest education was received under a Presbyterian schoolmaster. He was then removed to Bury school under the superintendence of 'a cavalier master,' and in 1653 became a fellow-commoner of St John's college, Cambridge. Being destined for the bar, he was admitted of the Middle Temple in 1665. Here he studied with great diligence, and on being called to the bar was much noticed and encouraged by the attorney-general Sir Geoffrey Palmer, who often employed him to search authorities for him. He made his first public appearance in arguing the writ of error brought on the conviction of Hollis and the other five members. The talent which he displayed on this occasion procured for him the rank of king's counsel on the recommendation of the duke of York. His practice now rapidly increased; and, on the 23d of May, 1671, he was appointed solicitor-general on the elevation of Sir Edward Turner, and, according to custom, received the honour of knighthood. While he held this office he was returned to parliament as member for Lynn; and on the promotion of Sir Heneage Finch to the woolsack, Sir Francis succeeded him as attorney-general. Practice now "flowed upon him like an orage, enough to overset one that had not extraordinary readiness in business." Yet with all his professional engagements, he found time for more liberal studies, and acquired considerable knowledge of the modern languages.

On the death of Sir John Vaughan, chief-justice of the common pleas, Sir Francis North was promoted to the vacant dignity. He now applied himself to the reformation of the abuses which existed in the practice of that court, and had a principal hand in framing the famous statute of frauds and perjuries, of which Lord Nottingham is reported to have said that every line was worth a subsidy. "He was," says his admiring biographer and younger brother, Roger North, "very good at waylaying the craft of counsel, for he, as they say, had been in the oven himself, and knew where to look for the pasty." On the formation of the Whig administration under Sir William Temple, Sir Francis was constituted a member of the privy council. On the death of Lordkeeper Finch, Sir Francis, after some dallying with Rochester, received the seal from the hand of the king himself, with this warning, "Here, my lord, take it; you will find it heavy !" "The evening that we spent upon this errand to Whitehall," says Roger North, "some of us stayed in expectation of his coming home, which was not till near ten ; little doubting the change that was to happen. At last he came with more splutter than ordinary, divers persons (for honour) waiting, and others attending to wish him joy, and a rabble of officers that belonged to the seal, completing the crowd which filled his little house. lordship, by despatching these incumbrances, got himself clear as fast as he could, and then I alone staid with him. He took a turn or two in his dining-room and said nothing, by which I perceived his spirits were

His

very much soiled; therefore I kept silence also, expecting what would follow. There was no need of asking when the purse with the great seal lay upon the table. At last his lordship's discourses and actions discovered that he was in a very great passion, such as may be termed agony, of which I never saw in him any like appearance since I first knew him. He had kept it in long, and after he was free it broke out with greater force, and, accordingly, he made use of me to ease his mind upon. That which so much troubled him, was the being thought so weak as to take ill usage from those about the king (meaning the earl of Rochester) with whom he had lived well, and ought to have been better understood. And instead of common friendship, to be haggled withal about a pension, as at the purchase of a horse or an ox, and after he had declared positively not to accept without a pension, as if he were so frivolous to insist and desist all in a moment, and, as it were, to be wheedled and charmed by their insignificant tropes; and what was worse than all, as he more than once repeated, to think me worthy of so great a trust, and withal so little and mean as to endure such usage as was disobliging, inconsistent, and insufferable. What have I done?'

said he, that may give them cause to think me of so poor a spirit as to be thus terrified with?' And so on with more of like animosity which I cannot undertake to remember. And, after these exhalations, I could perceive that by degrees his mind became more composed."

In the court of chancery the lord-keeper pursued his general reforms, and experienced the usual opposition which has always attended all attempts to purge out the peccant humours" of that court. The accession of Sunderland, Godolphin, and Jefferies, to the cabinet, placed the lord-keeper in a painful position; but he had the fortitude to adhere to his principles as a protestant, and, though he stood single in his opposition, stoutly resisted the motion made by Jefferies for a general pardon to the imprisoned recusants. The death of Charles, and the accession of James II., exposed his principles to a still severer test; and his constitutional opposition to sundry measures proposed by Jefferies, soon rendered him highly obnoxious to the court. At the opening of the new parliament he was not even consulted as to the substance of the king's speech, much less entrusted, as had been the custom hitherto, with the drawing up of it; his decrees in court were "most brutishly and effrontuously arraigned;" at court and at council "nothing squared with his schemes ;" and he was by "Sunderland, Jefferies, and their complices, little less than derided." Treatment so unmerited and from such personages gradually wrought upon his mind, till he fell into a deep and settled melancholy. "His feverish disease," says his affectionate biographer, "growing upon him, his spirits, and all that should buoy a man up under oppression, not only failed, but other things of a malign complexion succeeded to bring him lower: which may be fully understood by this circumstance. He took a fancy that he looked out of countenance, as he termed it; that is, as one ashamed, or as if he had done ill, and not with that face of authority as he used to bear; and for that reason, when he went into Westminster-hall, in the summer term, he used to take nosegays of flowers to hold before his face, that people might not discern his dejection; and once in private having told me this fancy, he asked me if I did not perceive it. I answered him, not in the least, nor did I believe any one else did observe any such thing; but

that he was not well in health as he used to be was plain enough. His lordship in this state took a resolution to quit the great seal, and went to my Lord Rochester to intercede with his majesty to accept it, which had been no hard matter to obtain. But that noble lord had no mind to part with such a screen, and at that time (as he told me himself) he diverted him. But his lordship persisted, as will be made appear afterwards, by a letter. Whereupon the lord Rochester obtained of the king that his lordship might retire with the seal into the country; and that the officers with their concerns should attend him there, in hopes that by the use of the waters and fresh air, he might recover his health against next winter, when it was hoped he would return perfectly recovered. This was indeed a royal condescension and singular favour to him." The spot chosen for Sir Francis's retirement was Wroxton in Oxfordshire; but the hopes of a recovery were vain; the powers of nature rapidly gave way, and on the 5th of September, 1685, he breathed his last. His life has been written with all the amiable partiality of affection by his younger brother; but justice compels us to estimate his public character many degrees lower than his biographer has done. Lord-keeper Guilford had few elements of real greatness in his character. He was an honest man compared with many around him, but he did not altogether escape the political corruption of the age in which he lived. He was indebted for his elevation to the possession of a sound discretion rather than to any eminence of talents. As a lawyer he was respectable, but did not occupy the foremost rank. In private life his character was amiable, and well-fitted to endear him to his family and friends.

Cooper, Garl of Shaftesbury.

BORN A. D. 1621.-DIED A. D. 1683.

THIS celebrated statesman was the son of Sir John Cooper of Rockburn, Hants, and Anne, daughter of Sir Anthony Ashley of Winborne, St Giles, in the county of Dorset. He was born at the house of his maternal grandfather, on the 22d of July, 1621. At the age of fifteen he was entered of Exeter college, Oxford, where he distinguished himself by the frequent display of high powers, and by constant assiduity in study. From college he removed to Lincoln's inn, where he chiefly devoted himself to constitutional law and English history. In the parliament which met in April, 1640, he sat as representative for Tewkesbury, though only nineteen years of age.

On the breaking out of the civil war he manifested a decided inclination to adhere to the king's party, but his views were of too moderate and compromising a cast for Charles at this period, and although he was subsequently invited to Oxford, and went thither, yet he found himself distrusted by the court, and soon after retired in disgust. Clarendon says that he immediately "gave himself up, body and soul," to the popular party. Without attaching much value to such testimony, from such a quarter, we are compelled to allow that young Cooper passed from the one party to the other with more facility than was altogether consistent with political integrity; personal resentment, rather