food but his drink was poisoned. Arsenic was mixed with the
salt he ate, and cantharides with the pepper. All this time his health
declined sensibly. Daily he grew weaker and weaker; and with a sickly
appetite craved for sweets and jellies. Rochester continued to condole
with him, and anticipated all his wants in this respect, sending him
abundance of pastry, and occasionally partridges and other game, and young
pigs. With the sauce for the game, Mrs. Turner mixed a quantity of
cantharides, and poisoned the pork with lunar-caustic. As stated on the
trial, Overbury took in this manner poison enough to have poisoned twenty
men; but his constitution was strong, and he still lingered. Franklin, the
apothecary, confessed that he prepared with Dr. Forman seven different
sorts of poisons, viz. aquafortis, arsenic, mercury, powder of diamonds,
lunar caustic, great spiders, and cantharides. Overbury held out so long
that Rochester became impatient, and in a letter to Lady Essex, expressed
his wonder that things were not sooner despatched. Orders were immediately
sent by Lady Essex to the keeper to finish with the victim at once.
Overbury had not been all this time without suspicion of treachery,
although he appears to have had no idea of poison. He merely suspected
that it was intended to confine him for life, and to set the king still
more bitterly against him. In one of his letters he threatened Rochester
that unless he were speedily liberated, he would expose his villany to the
world. He says, "You and I, ere it be long, will come to a public trial of
another nature." * * * "Drive me not to extremities, lest I should say
something that both you and I should repent." * * * "Whether I live or
die, your shame shall never die, but ever remain to the world, to make you
the most odious man living." * * * "I wonder much you should neglect him
to whom such secrets of all kinds have passed." * * * "Be these the fruits
of common secrets, common dangers?"

[Illustration: SIR THOMAS OVERBURY.]

All these remonstrances, and hints as to the dangerous secrets in his
keeping, were ill calculated to serve him with a man so reckless as Lord
Rochester: they were more likely to cause him to be sacrificed than to be
saved. Rochester appears to have acted as if he thought so. He doubtless
employed the murderer's reasoning, that "dead men tell no tales," when,
after receiving letters of this description, he complained to his paramour
of the delay.