nor attempted to revenge himself on his persecutors. A few days
after his consecration, some persons were seized while dispersing libels
in which he was reviled. The law officers of the Crown proposed to
institute prosecutions; but he insisted that nobody should be punished
on his account. [48] Once, when he had company with him, a sealed packet
was put into his hands; he opened it; and out fell a mask. His friends
were shocked and incensed by this cowardly insult; but the Archbishop,
trying to conceal his anguish by a smile, pointed to the pamphlets which
covered his table, and said that the reproach which the emblem of the
mask was intended to convey might be called gentle when compared with
other reproaches which he daily had to endure. After his death a bundle
of the savage lampoons which the nonjurors had circulated against him
was found among his papers with this indorsement: "I pray God forgive
them; I do." [49]

The temper of the deposed primate was very different. He seems to have
been under a complete delusion as to his own importance. The immense
popularity which he had enjoyed three years before, the prayers and
tears of the multitudes who had plunged into the Thames to implore his
blessing, the enthusiasm with which the sentinels of the Tower had drunk
his health under the windows of his prison, the mighty roar of joy
which had risen from Palace Yard on the morning of his acquittal,
the triumphant night when every window from Hyde Park to Mile End had
exhibited seven candles, the midmost and tallest emblematical of him,
were still fresh in his recollection; nor had he the wisdom to perceive
that all this homage had been paid, not to his person, but to that
religion and to those liberties of which he was, for a moment, the
representative. The extreme tenderness with which the new government had
long persisted in treating him seems to have confirmed him in his
error. That a succession of conciliatory messages was sent to him from
Kensington, that he was offered terms so liberal as to be scarcely
consistent with the dignity of the Crown and the welfare of the State,
that his cold and uncourteous answers could not tire out the royal
indulgence, that, in spite of the loud clamours of the Whigs, and of
the provocations daily given by the Jacobites, he was residing, fifteen
months after deprivation, in the metropolitan palace, these things
seemed to him to indicate not the lenity but the timidity of the ruling
pow