lowly advancing tide because
they would not attend Episcopal worship, or branded on their cheeks and
then shipped to America; gallant but wounded soldiers were hung in
Scotland for fear they should die before they could be got to England.
In the troubles connected with Monmouth's rising, in one county alone,
Somersetshire, two hundred and thirty-three persons were hanged, drawn
and quartered, to say nothing of military executions, for the soldiers
amused themselves by hanging a culprit for each toast they drank, and
making the drums and fifes play, as they said, to his dancing. It is
needless to recall such incidents as the ferocity of Kirk's lambs, for
such was the name popularly given to the soldiers of that colonel, in
allusion to the Paschal lamb they bore on their flag; or the story of
Tom Boilman, so nicknamed from having been compelled by those veterans
to seethe the remains of his quartered friends in melted pitch. Women,
for such idle words as women are always using, were sentenced to be
whipped at the cart's-tail through every market town in Dorset; a lad
named Tutching was condemned to be flogged once a fortnight for seven
years. Eight hundred and forty-one human beings judicially condemned to
transportation to the West India islands, and suffering all the horrible
pains of a slave-ship in the middle passage, "were never suffered to go
on deck;" in the holds below, "all was darkness, stench, lamentation,
disease, and death." One fifth of them were thrown overboard to the
sharks before they reached their destination, and the rest obliged to be
fattened before they could be offered in the market to the Jamaica
planters. The court ladies, and even the Queen of England herself, were
so utterly forgetful of womanly mercy and common humanity as to join in
this infernal traffic. That princess requested that a hundred of the
convicts should be given to her. "The profit which she cleared on the
cargo, after making a large allowance for those who died of hunger and
fever during the passage, cannot be estimated at less than a thousand
guineas."

[Sidenote: Profligate condition of literature.] It remains to add a few
words respecting the state of literature. This, at the end of the
seventeenth century, had become indescribably profligate, and, since the
art of reading was by no means generally cultivated, the most ready
method of literary communication was through theatrical representation.
It was for that reason that pl