of Coke. "Thou art a monster, thou hast an English face but a Spanish heart;" again, "I thou thee, thou traitor;" and at Palace Yard, Westminster, on that dreary October morning urging the sheriff to hurry, since he would not be thought fear-shaken when it was but the ague; for these are all-important episodes in the life of that richly dressed, stately and gallant figure your fancy is wont to picture sweeping the Spanish Main in his Elizabethan warship. Time would fail to tell of Strafford and Charles and Laud and a hundred others, for the collection begins with Thomas à Becket in 1163 and comes down to Thistlewood in 1820. Once familiar with those close-packed, badly printed pages, you find therein a deeper, a more subtle charm than cunningest romance can furnish forth. The account of Mary Stuart s ending has a finer hold than Froude's magnificent and highly decorated picture. Study at first hand "Bloody Jeffreys's" slogging of Titus Gates with that unabashed rascal s replies during his trial for perjury, or again my Lord's brilliant though brutal cross-examination of Dunn in the "Lady" Alice Lisle case, during the famous or infamous Western Circuit, and you will find Macaulay s wealth of vituperative rhetoric, tiresome and pointless verbiage. Also you will prefer to construct your own Braxfield from trials like those of Thomas Muir in 1793, and of Alexander Scott and Maurice Margarot in 1794, rather than accept the counterfeit presentment which Stevenson's master-hand has limned in Weir of Hermiston.
But the interests are varied. How full of grotesque and curious horrors are the prosecutions for witchcraft! There is that one, for instance, in March 1665 at Bury St. Edmunds before Sir Matthew Hale, with stories of bewitched children, and plague-stricken women, and satanic necromancy. Again, there is the diverting exposure of Richard Hathaway in 1702, and how the
