brave
fugitive. No time was lost in expediting his removal. Incapable of
rising from his pallet, the whole family were employed in conveying him
to the secret chamber, and in removing from the mausoleum every vestige
of its having been inhabited. Rubbish was piled against the door; and,
to prevent the path from being traced, the small stock of cattle the
Beaumonts possessed were driven into the burying-ground. The rising sun
saw their labours completed an hour before Morgan and his soldiers
arrived to execute their inhuman inquisition. The care of Williams had
frustrated the sagacity of the blood-hounds by a chemical preparation;
and a night of inexpressible alarm and emotion was succeeded by a happy
day, in which Isabel had the transport of having her dear father lodged
close to her own dwelling, in a more comfortable place of concealment,
where she could pay a more minute attention to his wants, and have an
assistant in the task of ministering to his infirmities; that assistant
too the lord of her affections, to whom she was ha longer compelled to
wear the air of cold reserve so uncongenial to her ingenuous temper.

The Beaumont family would now have felt happy, and Arthur might have
talked of love, assured of a favourable audience, had not every future
plan and private feeling been engrossed by the situation of the King,
whose mournful tragedy now drew near its final close. Like many others,
Arthur de Vallance had been drawn, by the grossest misrepresentations,
to oppose a Prince whose real character, bursting through the mists of
adversity, now dazzled the eyes of those who had affected to speak of
him as a meteorous exhalation, owing its lustre to chance, and destitute
of the inherent qualities which constitute true greatness. To a general
revolt and disaffection, arising from some actual and many imaginary
grievances, succeeded an universal conviction of delusion,
disappointment, disgust, and contrition. All parties but that which had
the King in their keeping were ready to unite in efforts to save him
from those who meant to make his corse a step to his hereditary dignity;
and this, no less from a sense of his deserts and injuries, than from
feeling experimentally, that destroying the balance of the Constitution
annihilated their own liberty, and that the whips used by lawful rulers
are, by usurpers, exchanged for scorpions. The rule of a limited monarch
was now supplied by the tyranny of many despots--I say many;