Not so our great, good martyred king of late,
(Could we his blessed example imitate,)
Who, though the greatest of mortal sufferers,
Yet kind to his rebellious murderers,
Forgave, and blessed them with his dying prayers.
Thus we, by sound divinity and sense,
May purge our minds, and weed all errors thence;
These lead us into right, nor shall we need
Other than them through life to be our guide.
Revenge is but a frailty, incident
To crazed and sickly minds, the poor content
Of little souls, unable to surmount
An injury, too weak to bear affront;
And this you may infer, because we find,
'Tis most in poor unthinking womankind,
Who wreak their feeble spite on all they can,
And are more kin to brute than braver man.
But why should you imagine, sir, that those
Escape unpunished, who still feel the throes
And pangs of a racked soul, and (which is worse
Than all the pains which can the body curse)
The secret gnawings of unseen remorse?
Believe't, they suffer greater punishment
Than Rome's inquisitors could e'er invent;
Nor all the tortures, racks, and cruelties,
Which ancient persecutors could devise,
Nor all, that Fox's[1] bloody records tell,
Can match what Bradshaw, and Ravaillac feel,
Who in their breasts carry about their hell.
- ↑ John Fox, a divine of the English Church, and author of the Book of Martyrs. He was brought up in the Roman Catholic religion, and reduced to great distress in consequence of having embraced the doctrines of the Reformation. In this extremity, while he was one day sitting in St. Paul's Church, exhausted by long fasting, a person unknown to him came up, and, putting a sum of money in his hands, told him that new means of subsistence would shortly be disclosed to him. The prediction was fulfilled within three days, when he was taken into the family of the Duchess of Richmond, as tutor to the
