ve escaped from his enemies, he was determined, in imitation of the
most illustrious names of antiquity, to perish in defence of liberty,
and to give testimony with his blood for that honorable cause in which
he had been enlisted; and that, besides the ties by which God and nature
had bound him to his native country, he was voluntarily engaged by the
most sacred covenant, whose obligation no earthly power should ever be
able to make him relinquish.

All the defence which Vane could make was fruitless. The court,
considering more the general opinion of his active guilt in the
beginning and prosecution of the civil wars, than the articles of
treason charged against him, took advantage of the letter of the
law, and brought him in guilty. His courage deserted him not upon his
condemnation. Though timid by nature, the persuasion of a just cause
supported him against the terrors of death, while his enthusiasm,
excited by the prospect of glory, embellished the conclusion of a life,
which through the whole course of it, had been so much disfigured by the
prevalence of that principle. Lest pity for a courageous sufferer
should make impression on the populace, drummers were placed under the
scaffold, whose noise, as he began to launch out in reflections on the
government, drowned his voice, and admonished him to temper the ardor of
his zeal. He was not astonished at this unexpected incident. In all
his behavior there appeared a firm and animated intrepidity; and he
considered death but as a passage to that eternal felicity which he
believed to be prepared for him.

This man, so celebrated for his parliamentary talents, and for his
capacity in business, has left some writings behind him: they treat, all
of them, of religious subjects, and are absolutely unintelligible: no
traces of eloquence, or even of common sense, appear in them. A strange
paradox! did we not know, that men of the greatest genius, where they
relinquish by principle the use of their reason, are only enabled,
by their vigor of mind, to work themselves the deeper into error and
absurdity. It was remarkable, that as Vane, by being the chief
instrument of Strafford's death, had first opened the way for that
destruction which overwhelmed the nation, so by his death he closed the
scene of blood. He was the last that suffered on account of the civil
wars. Lambert, though condemned, was reprieved at the bar; and the
judges declared, that if Vane's behavior had been equ