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almost hopeless. When young Maitland, the brother to the secretary, in order to palliate the crime of the assassination of the Regent Murray, was employed to draw up a pretended conference between him, Knox, and others, to stigmatize them by the odium of advising to dethrone the young monarch, and to substitute the regent for their sovereign, Maitland produced so dramatic a performance, by giving to each person his peculiar mode of expression, that this circumstance long baffled the incredulity of those who could not in consequence deny the truth of a narrative apparently so correct in its particulars! "The fiction of the warming-pan, enclosing the young Pretender, brought more adherents to the cause of the Whigs than the Bill of Rights," observes Lord John Russell.

Among such party narratives, the horrid tale of the bloody Colonel Kirk, has been worked up by Hume with all his eloquence and pathos; and, from its interest, no suspicion has arisen of its truth. Yet, so far as it concerns Kirk, or the reign of James the Second, or even English history, it is, as Ritson too honestly expresses it, "an im pudent and a barefaced lie!" The simple fact is

told by Kennet in few words: he probably was aware of the nature of this political fiction. Hume was not, indeed, himself the fabricator of the tale; but he had not any historical authority. The origin of this fable was probably a pious fraud of the Whig party, to whom Kirk had rendered himself odious; at that moment stories still more terrifying were greedily swallowed, and which, Ritson insinuates, have become a part of the history of England. The original story, related more circumstantially, though not more affectingly, nor perhaps more truly, may be found in Wanley's "Wonders of the Little World *," which I give, relieving it from the tediousness of old Wanley.

A governor of Zealand, under the bold Duke of Burgundy, had in vain sought to seduce the affections of the beautiful wife of a citizen. The governor imprisons the husband on an accusation of treason; and when the wife appeared as the suppliant, the governor, after no brief eloquence, succeded as a lover, on the plea that her husband's life could only be spared by her com

*Book III. ch. 29. sec. 18.

pliance. The woman, in tears and in aversion, and not without a hope of vengeance only delayed, lost her honour! Pointing to the prison, the governor told her, "If you seek your husband, enter there, and take him along with you!" The wife, in the bitterness of her thoughts, yet not without the consolation that she had snatched her husband from the grave, passed into the prison; there in a cell, to her astonishment and horror, she beheld the corpse of her husband laid out in a coffin, ready for burial! Mourning over it, she at length returned to the governor, fiercely exclaiming, "You have kept your word! you have restored to me my husband! and be assured the favour shall be repaid!" The inhuman villain, terrified in the presence of his intrepid victim, attempted to appease her vengeance, and more, to win her to his wishes. Returning home, she assembled her friends, revealed her whole story, and under their protection she appealed to Charles the Bold, a strict lover of justice, and who now awarded a singular but an exemplary catastrophe. The duke first commanded that the criminal governor should instantly marry the woman whom he had made

a widow, and at the same time sign his will, with a clause importing, that should he die before his lady he constituted her his heiress. All this was concealed from both sides, rather to satisfy the duke than the parties themselves. This done, the unhappy woman was dismissed alone! The governor was conducted to the prison to suffer the same death he had inflicted on the husband of his wife; and when this lady was desired once more to enter the prison, she beheld her second husband headless in his coffin as she had her first! Such extraordinary incidents in so short a period overpowered the feeble frame of the sufferer; she died-leaving a son, who inherited the rich accession of fortune so fatally obtained by his injured and suffering mother.

Such is the tale of which the party story of Kirk appeared to Ritson to have been a refaccimento; but it is rather the foundation than the superstructure. This critic was right in the main, but not by the bye; in the general, not in the particular. It was not necessary to point out the present source, when so many others of a parallel nature exist. This tale, universally

told, Mr. Douce considers as the origin of " Measure for Measure," and was probably some traditional event; for it appears sometimes with a change of names and places, without any of incident. It always turns on a soldier, a brother, or a husband executed; and a wife, or sister, a deceived victim, to save them from death. It was, therefore, easily transferred to Kirk, and Pomfret's poem of "Cruelty and Lust" long made the story popular. It could only have been in this form that it reached the historian, who, it must be observed, introduces it as a "story commonly told of him;" but popular tragic romances should not enter into the dusty documents of a history of England, and much less be particularly specified in the index! Belleforest, in his old version of the tale, has even the circumstance of "the captain, who having seduced the wife under the promise to save her husband's life, exhibited him soon afterwards through the window of her apartment suspended on a gibbet." This forms the horrid incident in

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the bloody Colonel," and served purpose of a party, who wished to bury him in odium. Kirk was a soldier of fortune, and a

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