t, therefore when any very material
inference with respect either to fact or character, is to be drawn from
them, to be received with great caution.

Rumbold, covered with wounds, and defending himself with uncommon
exertions of strength and courage, was at last taken. However desirable
it might have been thought to execute in England a man so deeply
implicated in the Rye House Plot, the state of Rumbold's health made such
a project impracticable. Had it been attempted he would probably, by a
natural death, have disappointed the views of a government who were eager
to see brought to the block a man whom they thought, or pretended to
think, guilty of having projected the assassination of the late and
present king. Weakened as he was in body, his mind was firm, his
constancy unshaken; and notwithstanding some endeavours that were made by
drums and other instruments, to drown his voice when he was addressing
the people from the scaffold, enough has been preserved of what he then
uttered to satisfy us that his personal courage, the praise of which has
not been denied him, was not of the vulgar or constitutional kind, but
was accompanied with a proportionable vigour of mind. Upon hearing his
sentence, whether in imitation of Montrose, or from that congeniality of
character which causes men in similar circumstances to conceive similar
sentiments, he expressed the same wish which that gallant nobleman had
done; he wished he had a limb for every town in Christendom. With
respect to the intended assassination imputed to him, he protested his
innocence, and desired to be believed upon the faith of a dying man;
adding, in terms as natural as they are forcibly descriptive of a
conscious dignity of character, that he was too well known for any to
have had the imprudence to make such a proposition to him. He concluded
with plain, and apparently sincere, declarations of his undiminished
attachment to the principles of liberty, civil and religious; denied that
he was an enemy to monarchy, affirming, on the contrary, that he
considered it, when properly limited, as the most eligible form of
government; but that he never could believe that any man was born marked
by God above another, "for none comes into the world with a saddle on his
back, neither any booted and spurred to ride him."

Except by Ralph, who, with a warmth that does honour to his feelings,
expatiates at some length upon the subject, the circumstances attending
the