lution. After King James's death, the
Queen and her people at St. Germains--priests and women for the most
part--continued their intrigues in behalf of the young Prince, James the
Third, as he was called in France and by his party here (this Prince, or
Chevalier de St. George, was born in the same year with Esmond's young
pupil Frank, my Lord Viscount's son); and the Prince's affairs, being in
the hands of priests and women, were conducted as priests and women will
conduct them, artfully, cruelly, feebly, and to a certain bad issue. The
moral of the Jesuits' story I think as wholesome a one as ever was
writ: the artfullest, the wisest, the most toilsome, and dexterous
plot-builders in the world--there always comes a day when the roused
public indignation kicks their flimsy edifice down, and sends its
cowardly enemies a-flying. Mr. Swift hath finely described that passion
for intrigue, that love of secrecy, slander, and lying, which belongs to
weak people, hangers-on of weak courts. 'Tis the nature of such to
hate and envy the strong, and conspire their ruin; and the conspiracy
succeeds very well, and everything presages the satisfactory overthrow
of the great victim; until one day Gulliver rouses himself, shakes off
the little vermin of an enemy, and walks away unmolested. Ah! the Irish
soldiers might well say after the Boyne, "Change kings with us and we
will fight it over again." Indeed, the fight was not fair between the
two. 'Twas a weak, priest-ridden, woman-ridden man, with such puny
allies and weapons as his own poor nature led him to choose, contending
against the schemes, the generalship, the wisdom, and the heart of a
hero.

On one of these many coward's errands then, (for, as I view them now,
I can call them no less,) Mr. Holt had come to my lord at Castlewood,
proposing some infallible plan for the Prince of Orange's destruction,
in which my Lord Viscount, loyalist as he was, had indignantly refused
to join. As far as Mr. Esmond could gather from his dying words, Holt
came to my lord with a plan of insurrection, and offer of the renewal,
in his person, of that marquis's title which King James had conferred on
the preceding viscount; and on refusal of this bribe, a threat was made,
on Holt's part, to upset my Lord Viscount's claim to his estate and
title of Castlewood altogether. To back this astounding piece of
intelligence, of which Henry Esmond's patron now had the first light,
Holt came armed with the lat