could not frame themselves to be common beggars, crept into private places; and some of them that had not private friends to relieve them even wasted silently away, and so died without noise. And so bitter was the remembrance of their former condition, and so insupportable the burden of their present calamity to many of them, as they even refused to be comforted. I have known of some that lay almost naked, and having clothes sent, laid them by, refusing to put them on; others that would not stir to fetch themselves food, though they knew where it stood ready for them; but they continued to lie nastily in their filthy rags and their dirt, not taking care to have anything clean, handsome, or comfortable about them; and so even worn out with the misery of their journey and cruel usage, having their spirits spent, their bodies wasted, and their senses failing, lay here pitifully languishing; and soon after they had recovered this town very many of them died, leaving their bodies as monuments of the most inhuman cruelties used towards them. The greatest part of the women and children thus barbarously expelled out of their habitations perished in the city of Dublin; and so great numbers of them were brought to their graves as all the churchyards within the whole town were of too narrow a compass to contain them. So as the lordsjustices took order to have two large pieces of new ground, one on each side of the river, taken in upon the out-greens, and set apart for burying-places."

Such atrocities, it has been remarked, must have greatly excited the spirit of superstition in that ignorant age. "Many of the rebel leaders were reported by the Protestants to have been struck with madness and horrible diseases. Apparitions were said to be seen hovering in the air, and were crying for vengeance. The bridge of Portadown, especially, was haunted by multitudes of ghosts, who walked upon the water, sometimes singing psalms, sometimes brandishing swords, and sometimes screeching in an awful manner. Elizabeth, wife of Captain Poire, of Armagh, went to Portadown to be satisfied with her own eyes and ears of the truth of these reports. It was twilight, and there she saw a woman waist-high in the water, naked, with elevated and closed hands, her hair hanging down, very white; her eyes seemed to twinkle, and her skin was as white as snow; which spirit seemed to stand upright in the water often repeating the word 'Revenge! Revenge! Revenge!' whereat this deponent, being put into a strong amazement and affright, walked from the place."

HE Story of the King and the Commons forms a memorable epoch in English history. Heretofore the swords of the nobles had on more than one occasion been unsheathed, and monarchs had been taught prudence if not wisdom; but resistance to the royal will had ever been on the side of the aristocracy, the people stood apart as though mere spectators at a stage play. "These be kings' matters," said they, and held aloof accordingly. But a great change took place when Charles challenged the Parliament, when his course of action, according to the famous Sir John Eliot, was reduced into a formula, namely, to make the men most obnoxious most secure, and those that to the public were most hateful to be the most honoured and esteemed-then was it that the people spoke and the battle was fought out. Queen Elizabeth-not by any means a mild spoken lady nor one easily turned from her own purpose-had occasionally disagreed with her Parliament, but she had the wisdom to make prompt redress. "This," says

Mr. Forster, "is what her example should have taught a court which unhappily was incapable of learning anything. She understood, if ever ruler did, the art in which the highest government consists of so conforming to the veracities and necessities around it, as to make itself really the expression of the people governed in their changing condition, in their new and impatient wants, in their increasing intelligence. But Charles the First had no one to tell him this, nor probably would have listened if there had been. The people around him could only see that he was not as brave as the great queen, and lament that he should rather have taken example by his father. But it would have been better for him if he had done even this. He suffered for want of his father's cowardice quite as much as for want of Elizabeth's courage. His was one of those natures, not uncommon, which, having no self-reliance, have yet a most intense self-reference, and make up for yielding in some point by obstinacy in some other; and it was his misery always to resist as he yielded too late. After giving up everything that had sustained the prerogative, while it had yet any work in the world to do, he believed in it to the last as the only thing that could help him; and he was not the less ready to seize Pym and Hampden in 1641 because of his defeat and discomfiture in the attempt to seize Eliot in 1626."

This Sir John Eliot was in very truth the foremost man in the great fight between the King and the Commons. He had passed off the field long before the final stroke was given, but it was he who had emboldened others to try this issue with the monarch, and on his head had fallen the wrath of majesty.

Buckingham, "dog Steenie," as we have seen, was the chosen favourite of King James, and his appointed and applauded companion to "baby Charles." Of his rapacity, insolence, and violence, we have seen something in a former story; and the eyes of honest John Eliot were upon him. In 1623 this good man made his great speech in Parliament, battling stoutly for the rights of the people and a check on the royal prerogative. Nothing at the time was gained by people or parliament, and royalty carried things with a high hand. When Charles came to the crown and found his treasury exhausted and his credit doubtful, his favourite Buckingham was still permitted to follow his own devices and to enrich himself with spoil. There was the fitting out of a fleet to ravage on the coasts of Spain and win plunder after a Corsair fashion. Of this expedition Mr. Forster says:-"In plain words, it was an attempt to

fill the king's empty coffers by a piratical foray on the wealth of Spain; and hence the zealous and secret appetite with which both king and duke had at the first pursued it. But ill-manned, ill-provisoned, and ill-commanded, it failed in every point. Sailing for Cadiz Bay, the shipping in that harbour might with ease have been taken; but the Spaniards were able to secrete their ships further up the harbour, while time was lost at Fort Puntal, which, after the English captains had wasted their batteries upon it for four-and-twenty hours, surrendered, at the mere summons of a portion of the troops who were landed next day, without firing a gun.

Wimbledon, landing the rest of his troops, then gave orders for the destruction of the communications with the mainland, which Essex had found easy in the great queen's time, and which, if the Suazzo bridge had now been as promptly struck down, would have laid Cadiz open to an effective attack. But, as Eliot afterwards bitterly described it, it was a dry and hungry march into a drunken quarter. Discovering on the way several cellars stored with wine, the troops became insubordinate, drunken, and disorderly; and Wimbledon, in a fright, without either a capable man's resource or a strong man's decision, carried them headlong back to

the fleet without having seen an enemy. At first he thought of retaining Puntal for better intercepting of the expected convoy, but all attempts to restore discipline were hopeless, and he re-embarked with ignominy. He then cruised about after the Spanish fleet for eighteen days, suffered it to escape him unobserved during the night, and returned to Plymouth with disease and mutiny raging on all sides around him, the officers loud in denunciation of his incompetency, and the men decimated by a sickness which they attributed to foul play and dishonesty in provisioning the

ships. Hundreds of seamen and soldiers were landed in a dying state, and more than a thousand were said to have perished before the ships reached harbour. For many months to come the appalling extent of the disaster showed itself visibly in every road and town on that western coast, and above all in the streets of Plymouth."

This disastrous expedition-so unlike, both in its project and result, the brave doings of Drake, Howard of Effingham, Raleigh and others-increased the discontent of the people. Buckingham was impeached by the House of Commons, with Sir John Eliot for its spokesman. Sir John