life, my
fortune, and my honour--I supplicated thy aid--I depended on thy
integrity, on our alliance in blood, on a friendship formed in our
boy-hood, on a thousand instances of kindness which I have shown
thee.--Thou stolest from me a pearl, rich as an empire, threwest at me
the worthless shell, and then badest thy plundered brother be grateful
for thy mercy. Mine, Walter, is not the voice of a raving mendicant, it
sounds not in thine ears as the ingratitude of an eleemosynary
pensioner, but as the groan of a perturbed spirit, risen from the grave
to demand vengeance."

"Hear me," continued he, as Bellingham hid his face with his cloak. "Am
not I the friend of thy youth, the brother of thy wife, the owner of thy
lands, castles, of all that thou hast, except that wretched body.--Where
is my son? My Eustace; condemned by thee in cold blood at Pembroke, for
being faithful to the King who ennobled thee, and was then betrayed by
thy treasons! Mark, traitor; at the time that thou unpitying sawest the
heir of the greatness thou hast long usurped walk to execution, this
innocent man, whom thou art now persecuting, preserved the life of thy
only child. And dost thou reproach me with the calamities thou hast
brought upon me? Remember what I was, before thy avarice and ambition
cancelled the ties of blood and gratitude, crushed me to the earth, and
plumed thy borrowed pomp with the wings of my lineal greatness. I am now
a lame, old, destitute Loyalist; yet, for ten thousand worlds, I would
not cease to be the thing I am, if the alternative must be to become
what thou art; a meteor, born in the concussion of the elements; a
timorous slave of power, scared into the commission of any action which
may prolong a life, miserable in its continuance, tremendous in its
close."

He now turned to the judges, who were gazing on him in silent
consternation. "Are you," said he, "administrators of the new code of
criminal justice, or sworn extirpators of inconvenient rectitude. You
see in me the bloody malignant, whom Beaumont cherished for years in the
secret chamber. Have I physical strength to assassinate a vigorous
youth? This arm was rendered useless at the battle of Marston-Moor;
these knees were enfeebled by infirmity, resulting from the hardships I
endured at the siege of Pontefract-Castle. Thus maimed and disabled, I
was removed from a cave where I was hid by my kind comrades on a wain,
concealed under rubbish and fed by my daughter