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lest he should be torn to pieces by the mob in passing to execution, he replied, "I die to please the people, and I will die in their own way"." With such stern indifference to his fate, he was not likely to debase his dignity by puerile expressions of it.

6 [Flecknoe has an epigram "On the Lady Rockingham's nursing her Children herself," which thus concludes:

"Mirror of mothers! in whom all may see

By what you are, what others ought to be,
Ready, like pelicans for their young ones good,
To give their very lives and vital bloud:

For so, if milk be bloud, but cloath'd in white,

You shew yourself great STRAFFORD's daughter right;
Equally ready both for the publick good,

You, for to give your milk, and he his bloud."

Epigrams, 1670, p. 35.]

'Lord Roscommon, in one of his poems, makes the ghost of

the old house of commons, say to the new one:

"I chang'd true freedom for the name of free,

And grew seditious for variety:

All that oppos'd me were to be accus'd,

And by the laws illegally abus'd;

The robe was summon'd, Maynard in the head

In legal murder none so deeply read;

I brought him to the bar, where once he stood

Stain'd with the yet unexpiated blood

Of the brave STRAFFORD; where three kingdoms rung

With his accumulative hackney-tongue;

Prisoners and witnesses were waiting by,

These had been taught to swear, and those to die;

And to expect their arbitrary fates,

Some for ill faces, some for good estates."

Alexander Gill, the younger, published an elegy on Thomas,

earl of Strafford, according to Wood's Athenæ, vol. ii. col. 22.]

[Sir Thomas Wentworth, born in 1593, was lineally descended, as the preamble to his patent sets forth, from John of Gaunt. He spent some years at Cambridge, where he used great diligence, and made great progress in learning. On quitting the university he travelled abroad for farther accomplishments. In 1614 he became possessed of a family estate of £6000 per annum; was appointed custos rotulorum for the county of York; and made a conspicuous figure in the English annals both as commoner and peer, and in the cabinet as well as the field. He sided with the anti-courtiers, till he saw they aimed to overthrow the constitution, and then heartily concurred with the king's ministers, which so highly exasperated the popular demagogues, that they never ceased their machinations till this true patriot was brought to the block. In 1628 he was created by Charles the first baron and viscount Wentworth, and soon after president of York, and privy-counsellor 3. In 16334 he

New Biog. Dict. vol. xv. p. 233. Corrected by sir G. W. Radcliffe's Essay towards a Life of Lord Strafford.

3 Howell wrote to his father in December 1630, “Sir T. Wentworth hath been a good while lord president of York, and since is sworn privy-counsellor, and made baron and viscount. The duke of Buckingham himself flew not so high in so short a revolution of time. My lord Powis (who affects him not so much) being told that the heralds had fetched his pedigree from the blood-royal, viz. from John of Gaunt, said, 'Damme, if ever he come to be king of England, I will turn rebel.'" Fam. Letters, book i. p. 226.

↑ Or 1631, ut supra, where he is said to have exercised power with great severity: and Mrs. Macauley has incontestably

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