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lowed the jury out of court, under pretence of taking some refreshment, and when they were consulting about their verdict, gave them more particular instructions. In about half an hour they returned with a verdict of guilty. Sydney desired, before the verdict was recorded, to examine them by turns, whether every one of them had found him guilty, and more especially, whether they had found him guilty of compassing the king's death, of levying war against the king, or of any treason within the statute 25 Edward III, or of any proved against him by two witnesses, but the chief justice would not allow him to proceed.

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Three days after the trial, (24 Nov.) the duke of Monmouth surrendered himself to the secretary of state, and received a full pardon for his share in the supposed plot. circumstance revived the hopes of Sydney's friends, and he was persuaded to deliver through Lord Halifax a petition to the king, stating the irregularity of the proceedings against him, and praying an audience with his majesty. This, through the influence of the duke of York, was denied, and Jefferies declared in his furious way, that either Sydney or himself must die.' On the 26th, when he was brought up for sentence and asked what he had to say in bar of judgment, Sydney again urged the extreme injustice with which he had been treated. While insisting on the rejection of his special plea, judge Withens who seemed to be drunk, gave him the lie; on which he calmly observed, that having lived above three score years, he had never received or deserved such language, having never asserted any thing that was false.' Finding all that he stated in arrest of judgment thus violently overborne by his judges, he said aloud, I must appeal to God and the world, I am not heard.' The chief justice, after declaiming on the prisoner's guilt, his obligations to the king, and the treasonable nature of his writings, proceeded to pronounce sentence of death in the usual form. Then, O God, O God,' said Sydney, with an unaltared mien, 'I beseech thee sanctify these sufferings unto me, and impute not my blood to the country nor the city through which I am to be drawn. Let no inquisition be made for it, but if any, and the shedding of blood that is innocent must be avenged, let the weight of it fall upon those that maliciously persecute me for righteousness' sake.' Lord chief justice-I pray God work in you a temper fit for the other world, for I see you are not fit for this.'

Colonel Sydney, (stretching forth his hand,) my lord, feel my pulse, and see if I am disordered. I bless God I never was in better temper than I am now.' The friends of Sydney still made great efforts to save him, and persuaded him, although he entertained no hopes of success, to present a second petition to the king, that his punishment might be changed into perpetual banishment. This had no greater success than the first, and Sydney, resigning himself to his lot, employed the interval allowed him after sentence, in exercises of religion, and in drawing up an appeal to posterity on the injustice of his fate. When he saw the warrant for his execution, he expressed no concern, and amazed all around, by his calm demeanor.

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On the morning of the 7th of December the sheriffs again proceeded to the tower, and about ten o'clock receiving Sydney from the hands of the lieutenant, conducted him on foot to the place of execution on Tower Hill. He was attended only by two of his brother's servants. He ascended the scaffold with a firm, undaunted mein, worthy, says bishop Burnet, of the man who set up Marcus Brutus as his model. He gave a paper, containing a manly vindication of his innocence, to the sheriffs, observing, that he had made his peace with God, and had nothing more to say to men;' but he declined either reading it or having it read to the multitude, and offered to tear it if it was not received. He then pulled off his coat, hat, and doublet, saying, that he was ready to die, and would give them no farther trouble.' He gave three guineas to the executioner, and perceiving the fellow grumble as if the sum were inadequate, desired a servant to give him a guinea or two He then kneeled down, and after a solemn pause of a few minutes, calmly laid his head upon the block. Being asked by the executioner if he should rise again, he replied, 'not till the general resurrection-strike on.' The executioner obeyed, and severed his head from his body at a blow. His remains, being placed in a coffin, were immediately restored to his friends; and on the following day interred with his aneestors at Penshurst. Powerful as the interest of the court was at this time, it could not stifle the voice of the nation, which cried out against the violence and infamy of these proeeedings. The time was not far distant when the memory of Sydney was to receive from his countrymen the only reparation in their power to make for his cruel fate. By a bill brought into parliament April 24, 1689, which passed both

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houses, his conviction and attainder are declared wrongful and unjust, and all records and proceedings regarding them are ordered to be cancelled, that they might not be visible to future times. The memory of such iniquity was not to be so easily effaced, and the characters of Russell and Sydney, and their prosecutors, have been handed down together to posterity, who have awarded the retribution they respectively merit. It was the fate of Sydney, as it has been of many great men, to be superior to the age in which he lived. He was equally above the cant and bigotry of one party in the state, and the profligacy and corruption of the other. He was enlightened in an age of prejudice, disinterested in an age of venality. He is one of the few men, who have followed steadily in practice the principles they supported in their writings. His discourses on government, which appeared soon after his death, were generally read and admired, but as mankind has advanced in the science of government and civil liberty, this treatise has been gradually neglected. What was considered by Sydney's contemporaries as a fanciful theory, has long been matter of experience. From this circumstance, some persons in later times have been led to treat his political writings with a degree of contempt they by no means deserve, not reflecting that he had to contend against doctrines, which, at the present day, can hardly be mentioned with gravity. Sydney has the merit of having been one of the first to discover and defend the maxim, that the true and only basis of a free government is the will of the people. These principles have since been recognised in England, and are adopted and acted upon in their fullest extent, in our own admirable constitutions. Mr Meadley deserves the highest praise for his manly and able vindication of the character and opinions of Sydney, at a time when such sentiments are by no means the surest passport to favor in his own country. Such examples cannot be too often held up or too strongly recommended. To us, as republicans, they are invaluable. The integrity, the virtue, the constancy of Sydney should animate us to hope and to struggle, even in the darkest times; while the arbitrary and detestable measures resorted to for his destruction, teach a lesson which should never be forgotten by the citizens of a free state; that the only support of an equal government is the virtue of the governed, for when that fails, the very institutions that are established for the protection of life and property, may be converted into the most dreadful engines of oppression and injustice.

ART. VII.-Godfrey of Bulloigne; or the recovery of Jerusa lem. By Edward Fairfax. Windsor, 1817.

THIS work was first published, as we are informed in a life of the author prefixed to the edition before us, A. D. 1600, and was so popular at that moment, that it was immediately incorporated with the works of the most celebrated British poets, in a compilation, called England's Parnassus. It must soon have ceased however to be generally admired, for it passed through only three more editions from that time to the year 1817, and in all these is said to have been materially disfigured, by unwarrantable alterations; a liberty, which had it been taken with a work of high and extensive popularity, could not have so long remained unnoticed. Indeed, the biographer to whom we have already referred, and who exhibits no little degree of the enthusiastic attachment generally felt by editors for their authors, has been able to collect no testimony of any weight in favor of Fairfax, except a few remarks from Dryden, a single sentence from Hume, and a stanza from Collins. Dryden merely calls Fairfax the poetical father of Waller, a compliment of far less value at present, than at the time when it was paid; and Hume contents himself with a short and guarded encomium on his elegance and exactness. For the opinion of the 'learnedly beautiful Collins,' as the editor styles him, we refer our readers to the ode on highland superstitions. We are informed indeed, that king James preferred Fairfax to any other poet, and that king Charles II amused himself, while in prison, by reading his Tasso; but it is not very probable that these stories, if correct, would be unsupported by any other respectable authority, than that of Brian Fairfax, one of the poet's descendants, who might naturally and excusably believe them on the slightest evidence. There is every reason, in short, to conclude, that however highly the work before us may have been appreciated by a few distinguished scholars, it was as little known to most readers of English poetry during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as Jonson's Horace or Sandy's Ovid.

This long neglect may have been altogether the effect of accident, but can be partly explained by another obvious reason. With a few exceptions, those poetical translators who flourished in the infancy of English literature, were distinguished by a servile adherence to the letter of their originals.

which could render their productions acceptable, only to a few minute and pedantic critics. It was their first, if not their exclusive aim to be faithful, and this object they thought was best secured by being literal. They seem to have been wholly ignorant of those maxims which have been so often and so well explained by their abler successors, that in translation, as in law, extreme right is often extreme wrong, that nothing is more unfaithful than a punctilious fidelity, that a good interpreter can sometimes best preserve the spirit of the original by sacri ficing the letter. They construed, rather than translated. Their versions of the finest authors of antiquity were mean and spiritless explanations, and resembled a modern copy of the Apollo Belvedere, where the size and figure of all parts of the original are preserved with mathematical exactness, but that which far excels any thing else, that which cannot be measured by rule, nor defined by lines, that wherein lies the unparalleled value of this cunningest pattern of excelling art,' that which genius can never hope to equal, and may glory in imitating, the breathing expression, which is the very life of the marble, is 'utterly lost. It is no wonder that such productions should be despised and neglected, or preserved for no nobler and more useful purpose, than, as Johnson observes of Trapp, to be the clandestine refuge of school boys. Poetry was then far less generally read and criticised than now, and that Fairfax should share in the general fate of that class of writers, to which he had the misfortune to belong, however unjust, was evidently not very unnatural.

About the year 1763 a second version of the Jerusalem Delivered was published, as is well known, by Hoole, who thought proper to insert in his preface a formal attack on the merits of his predecessor. He tells us, if we understand his meaning, for his expressions are obscure and ungrammatical, -thatFairfax's stanza, which is that of Tasso himself, is not only unpleasant, but irksome, that it is altogether unharmonious to an English ear, and that his version was written at a period [that is to say, in the age of Spenser and Shakspeare] when our verse, if not our language, was in its rudiments.' We shall presently see how far Hoole is warranted in these modest and elegant remarks, and may find better reasons than he has avowed, for his manifest solicitude to divert the public attention from a work, which, according to his own representations,

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