have upheld; but there are passages of lasting interest in the account of their last moments, which the reader will perhaps expect to see. As Harrison was going to suffer, 66 one in derision called to him and said, 'Where is your Good Old Cause ?' He with a cheerful smile clapt his hand on his breast, and said 'Here it is, and I am going to seal it with my blood!' And when he came to the sight of the gallows, he was transported with joy, and his servant asked him how he did; he answered 'Never better in my life.' His servant told him, 6 Sir, there is a crown of glory ready prepared for you.' "O yes,' said he, 'I see.' When he was taken off the sledge, the hangman desired him to forgive him. 'I do forgive thee,' said he, 'with all my heart, as it is a sin against me;' and told him he wished him all happiness. And further said, Alas, poor man, thou doest it ignorantly; the Lord grant that this sin may not be laid to thy charge!' And putting his hand into his pocket gave him all the money he had, and so parting with his servant, hugging of him in his arms, he went up the ladder with an undaunted countenance. 6 "The people observing him to tremble in his hands and legs, he, taking notice of it, said: "Gentlemen, by reason of some scoffing that I do hear, I judge that some do think I am afraid to die, by the shaking I have in my hands and knees; I tell you no, but it is by reason of much blood I have lost in the wars, and many wounds I have received in my body, which caused this shaking and weakness in my nerves; I have had it this twelve years: I speak this to the praise and glory of God; he hath carried me above the fear of death; and I value not my life, because I go to my Father, and am assured I shall take it again. "Gentlemen, take notice, that for being instrumental in that cause and interest of the Son of God, which hath been pleaded amongst us, and which God hath witnessed to my appeals and wonderful victories I am brought to this place to suffer death this day, and if I had ten thousand lives, I could freely and cheerfully lay them down all, to witness to this matter.'"* 66 The time of Colonel Jones's departure being come, "this aged gentleman," says the account, was drawn in one sledge with his aged companion Scroope, whose grave and graceful countenances, accompanied with courage and cheerfulness, caused great admiration and compassion in the spectators, as they passed along the streets to Charing Cross, the place of their execution; and, after the executioner had done his part upon three others that day, he was so drunk with blood, that, like one surfeited, he grew sick at stomach; and not being able himself, he set his boy to finish the tragedy upon Col. Jones." The night before he died he "told a friend he had no other temptation but this, lest he should be too much transported, and carried out to neglect and slight his life, so greatly was he satisfied to die in that cause." "The day he suffered, he grasped a friend in his arms, and said to him with some expressions of endearment, Farewell: I could wish thee in the same condition with myself, that thou mightest share with me in my joys."† The famous Hugh Peters, the commonwealth preacher, whom Burnet speaks of as an "enthusiastical buffoon," and a very “vicious man," is thought by a greater loyalist (Burke) to have had "hard measures dealt him at the Restoration." He calls him a 66 poor good man." Peters was afraid at first he should not behave himself with the proper courage, but rallied his spirits afterwards, and, according to the account published by his friends (and all the accounts, it should be observed, emanate from that side), no man appears to have behaved better. Burnet says otherwise, and that he was observed all the while to be drinking cordials to keep him from fainting, and *State Trials, ut supra, vol. v. p. 1236. Burnet's testimony is not to be slighted, though he seems too readily to have taken upon trust some evil reports of Peter's life and manners, which the "poor man" expressly contradicted in prison. Be this as it may, “Being carried," says the account, "upon the sledge to execution, and made to sit thereon within the rails at Charing Cross to behold the execution of Mr. Cook, one comes to him and upbraided him with the death of the King, bidding him (with opprobrious language) to repent: he replied, Friend, you do not well to trample upon a dying man; you are greatly mistaken, I had nothing to do in the death of the King. "When Mr. Cook was cut down and brought to be quartered, one they called Colonel Turner called to the Sheriff's men to bring Mr. Peters near that he might see him; and by and by the hangman came to him all besmeared in blood, and rubbing his bloody hands together, he tauntingly asked, 'Come, how do you like this, how do you like this work?' To whom he replied, 'I am not, I thank God, terrified at it; you may do your worst.' "When he was going to his execution, he looked about and espied a man, to whom he gave a piece of gold (having bowed it first), and desired him to go to the place where his daughter lodged, and to carry that to her as a token from him, and to let her know that his heart was as full of comfort as it could be, and that before that piece should come into her hands he should be with God in glory. 66 'Being upon the ladder, he spake to the Sheriff, saying, Sir, you have here slain one of the servants of God before mine eyes, and have made me to behold it on purpose to terrify and discourage me; but God hath made it an ordinance to me for my strengthening and encouragement. "When he was going to die, he said, What! flesh, art thou unwilling to go to God through the fire and jaws of death? Oh (said he), this is a good day; he is come that I have long looked for, and I shall be with him in glory; and so smiled when he went away. "What Mr. Peters said farther at his execution, either in his speech or prayer, it could not be taken, in regard his voice was low at that time, and the people uncivil."* Ben Jonson is supposed to have been born in Hartshorn Lane, Charing Cross, where he lived when a little child. 66 Though I cannot," says Fuller, "with all my industrious inquiry, find him in his cradle, I can fetch him from his long coats. When a little child he lived in Hartshorn Lane, Charing Cross, when his mother married a bricklayer for her second husband. He was first bred in a private school in St. Martin's Court; then in Westminster school." But we shall have other occasions of speaking of him. The famous reprobate Duke of Buckingham, Villiers, the second of that name, was born in Wallingford House, which stood on the site of the present Admiralty. "The Admiralty Office," says Pennant, "stood originally in Duke Street, Westminster: but in the reign of King William was removed to the present spot, to the house then called Wallingford, I believe from its having been inhabited by the Knollys, Viscounts Wallingford. From the roof the pious Usher, Archbishop of Armagh, then living here with the Countess of Peterborough, was prevailed on to take the last sight of his beloved master Charles I. when brought on the scaffold before Whitehall. He sunk at the horror of the sight, and was carried in a swoon to his apartment." Wallingford House was often used by Cromwell and others in their consultations. 66 "The present Admiralty office," continues Pennant, was rebuilt in the late reign, by Ripley; it is a clumsy pile, but properly veiled from the street by Mr. Adam's handsome screen.' Where the poor Archbishop sank in horror at the sight of the misguided Charles, telegraphs * State Trials, vol. v. p. 1282. now ply their dumb and far-seen discourses, like spirits in the guise of mechanism, and tell news of the spread of liberty and knowledge all over the world. Of the Villierses, Dukes of Buckingham, who have not heard? The first one was a favourite not unworthy of his fortune, open, generous, and magnificent; the second, perhaps because he lost his father so soon, a spoiled child from his cradle, wilful, debauched, unprincipled, but witty and entertaining. Here, and at York House in the Strand, he turned night into day, and pursued his intrigues, his concerts, his dabblings in chemistry and the philosopher's stone, and his designs on the crown: for Charles's character, and the devices of Buckingham's fellow quacks and astrologers, persuaded him that he had a chance of being king. When a youth, he compounded with Cromwell, and married Fairfax's daughter;-he was afterwards all for the king, when he was not "all for rhyming" or ousting him;-when an old man, or near it (for these prodigious possessors of animal spirits have a trick of lasting a long while), he was still a youth in improvidence and dissipation, and his whole life was a dream of uneasy pleasure. He is now best known from Dryden's masterly portrait of him in the Absalom and Achitophel.' "A man so various, that he seemed to be, |