executed without any breach of indispensable duty; nay, that it is an act of heroic generosity if he spares him.  I never reflect on Mr. Hume’s statement of this matter but with the deepest regret.  Widely as I differ from him upon many other occasions, this appears to me to be the most reprehensible passage of his whole work.  A spirit of adulation towards deceased princes, though in a good measure free from the imputation of interested meanness, which is justly attached to flattery when applied to living monarchs, yet, as it is less intelligible with respect to its motives than the other, so is it in its consequences still more pernicious to the general interests of mankind.  Fear of censure from contemporaries will seldom have much effect upon men in situations of unlimited authority: they will too often flatter themselves that the same power which enables them to commit the crime will secure them from reproach.  The dread of posthumous infamy, therefore, being the only restraint, their consciences excepted, upon the passions of such persons, it is lamentable that this last defence (feeble enough at best) should in any degree be impaired; and impaired it must be, if not totally destroyed, when tyrants can hope to find in a man like Hume, no less eminent for the integrity and benevolence of his heart than for the depth and soundness of his understanding, an apologist for even their foulest murders.

Thus fell Russell and Sidney, two names that will, it is hoped, be for ever dear to every English heart.  When their memory shall cease to be an object of respect and veneration, it requires no spirit of prophecy to foretell that English liberty will be fast approaching to its final consummation.  Their department was such as might be expected from men who knew themselves to be suffering, not for their crimes, but for their virtues.  In courage they were equal, but the fortitude of Russell, who was connected with the world by private and domestic ties, which Sidney had not, was put to the severer trial; and the story of the last days of this excellent man’s life fills the mind with such a mixture of tenderness and admiration, that I know not any scene in history that more powerfully excites our sympathy, or goes more directly to the heart.

The very day on which Russell was executed, the University of Oxford passed their famous decree, condemning formally, as impious and heretical propositions, every principle upon which the constitution of this or any other free country can maintain itself.  Nor was this learned body satisfied with stigmatising such principles as contrary to the Holy Scriptures, to the decrees of councils, to the writings of the fathers, to the faith and profession of the primitive church, as destructive of the kingly government, the safety of his majesty’s person, the public peace, the laws of nature, and bounds of human society; but after enumerating the several obnoxious propositions, among which was one declaring all civil authority derived from the people; another, asserting a mutual contract, tacit or express, between the king and his subjects; a third, maintaining the lawfulness of changing the succession to the crown; with many others of a like nature, they solemnly decreed all and every of those propositions to be not only false and seditious, but impious, and that the books which contained them were fitted to lead to rebellion, murder of princes, and atheism itself.  Such are the absurdities which men are not ashamed to utter in order to cast odious imputations upon their adversaries; and such the manner in which churchmen will abuse, when it suits their policy, the holy name of that religion whose first precept is to love one another, for the purpose of teaching us to hate our neighbours with more than ordinary rancour.  If Much Ado about Nothing had been published in those days, the town-clerk’s declaration, that receiving a thousand ducats for accusing the Lady Hero wrongfully, was flat burglary, might be supposed to be a satire upon this decree; yet Shakespeare, well as he knew human nature, not only as to its general course, but in all its eccentric deviations, could never dream that, in the persons of Dogberry, Verges, and their followers, he was representing the vice-chancellors and doctors of our learned university.