where she found him still with his hat and baldric on, sitting at a table covered with green velvet.

"What prompted thee to seek my Life?" he asked, without anger, but in a slow, cold, searching voice.

"Blood for Blood!" she answered, with undaunted mien.

"What evil have I done thee that thou shouldst seek my blood?" "What evil-what evil, Moloch?-all! Thou hast slain the King my Lord and master. Thou hast slain the dear brother who was my playmate, and my father's hope and pride. Thou hast slain the sweet and gallant youth who was to have been my husband."

"Thou art that Arabella Greenville, then, the daughter of the wavering half-hearted Esquire of the West."

"I am the daughter of a gentleman of long descent. I am Arabella Greenville; and I cry for vengeance for the blood of Charles Stuart, for the blood of Richard Greenville, for the blood of Francis Villiers. Blood for Blood!"

That terrible gleam of Madness leapt out of her blue eyes, and, all bound as she was, she rushed towards the Protector as though in her fury she would have spurned him with her foot, or torn him with her teeth. The Sergeant for his part made as though he would have drawn his sword upon her; but Oliver laid his hand on the arm of his officer, and bade him forbear.

"Leave the maiden alone with me," he said calmly; "wait within call. She can do no harm." Then, when the soldiers had withdrawn, he walked to and fro in the room for many minutes, ever and anon turning his head and gazing fixedly on the prisoner, who stood erect, her head high, her hands, for all their bonds, clenched in defiance.

"Thou knowest," he said, "that thy Life is forfeit." "I care not. The sooner the better.

I ask but one Mercy: that you send me not to Tyburn, but to Hampton Court; there to be shot to death in the courtyard by a file of musketeers."

"Wherefore to Hampton?"

"Because it was there you murdered my Lover and my Brother."

"I remember," the Protector said, bowing his head. "They were rare Malignants, both. I Remember; it was on the same thirtieth of January that Charles Stuart died the death. But shouldst thou not, too, bear in mind that Vengeance is not thine, but the Lord's ?"

"Blood for Blood!"

"Thou art a maiden of a stern Resolve and a strong Will," said the Protector musingly. "If thou art pardoned, wilt thou promise repentance and amendment?"

"Blood for Blood!"

"Poor distraught creature," this once cruel man made answer, "I will have no blood of thine. I have had enough," he continued, with a dark look and a deep sigh; "I am weary; and Blood will have Blood. But that my life was in Mercy saved for the weal of these kingdoms, thou mightst have done with me, Arabella Greenville, according to thy desires."

He paused, as though for some expression of sorrow; but she was silent.

"Thou art hardened," he resumed; "it may be that there are things that cannot be forgiven."

"There are," she said firmly.

"I spare thy life," the Lord Protector continued; "but, Arabella Greenville, thou must go into Captivity. Until I am Dead, we two cannot be at large together. But I will not doom thee to a solitary prison. Thou shalt have a companion in durance. Yes," he ended, speaking between his teeth, and more to himself than to her, "she shall join Him yonder in his lifelong prison. Blood for Blood; the Slayer and the Avenger shall be together."

She was taken back to her place of confinement, where meat and drink were placed before her, and a tiring-woman attended her with a change of garments. And at day-break the next morning she was taken away in a litter towards Colchester in Essex.*

*Those desirous of learning fuller particulars of my Grandmother's History, or anxious to satisfy themselves that I have not Lied, should consult a book called The Travels of Edward Brown, Esquire, that is now in the Great Library at Montague House. Mr. Brown is in most things curiously exact; but he errs in stating that Mrs. Greenville's name was Letitia,-it was Arabella.

In the Name of the Prophet-Smith!*

"ERROR," writes old Fuller in his Church History, "cannot by any continuance of time become truth, but rather the more damnable error." This sentence, which looks so like a truism that we forget its importance, embalms a truth which should never be lost sight of. Certainly old lies do not, and cannot, become truth, but they become very respectable. Old rogueries gain credit, old crimes are forgotten and forgiven, old follies and wickednesses are condoned; antiquity, especially if it brings wealth with it, seems to render sins less hateful. As great families date with pride from mere robber-knights and military marauders, so around a nucleus of rascality, stupidity, and cunning, the present age is quite ready to weave an ornamental covering of heroism, or even of sanctity, bearing out that singular story in Boccaccio's First Day, in which the satirist exhibits an impenitent murderer who, by a consummate hypocrisy, manages to get himself admitted within the Calendar, and surrounds his name with the very odour of sanctity.

The latest proof of this protean power of roguery is to be found in the extraordinary manner in which Mormonism is now regarded. In the year 1805 was born Mr. Joseph Smith, son of a man of the same name, and of the woman Lucy Mack, alias "Mother Smith." The place of his birth was Sharon, Windsor, county Vermont. Smith was therefore properly a Yankee. During the years 1828 and '29, Smith and his accomplicesOliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris-pretended to translate from certain apocryphal plates of gold the Book of Mormon. In 1829 these men baptised each other in the new faith. In 1830 the Book of Mormon was published, so that that year became the year One of the new apostasy. But in thirty years afterwards the rogue, whose character had been since that fully known and ventilated, and who had himself fallen a victim to the indignation of his neighbours and fellowcountrymen, had become the founder-the successful founder of a new religion, and had by success rendered it respectable enough to have works in the chief languages published in its defence, and to find defenders and partisans among the intellects of Europe, and has found leading reviewers who, although opposed to his doctrines, were so impressed by his success, that they have become his apologists, and persist in regarding him as a remarkable man, and in drawing a parallel between him and Mahomet ! Perhaps in no other age has the swift and successful progress of error been so thoroughly marked and remarkable. The rise and progress of Mahomet does not, as we shall have occasion to show, afford any thing

*The City of the Saints. By Captain R. F. Burton. H.M. Consul, Fernando Po. The Millennial Star, 1861 passim.

A Journey to the Great Salt-Lake City. By M. Jules Remy and Mr. Brench ley. London: Jeffs.

like a parallel. Mahomet arose in a barbarous age, and was surrounded by ignorance and darkness. Smith, on the contrary, was born in a country which had long boasted its enlightenment, its freedom, and its religious knowledge. The ground which the great Arabian broke up and cultivated was untouched and fallow; that which Smith occupied was planted far and wide by ministers of the Gospel. The success of Mahomet was the success of force; that of Smith of obstinate endurance. Mahomet appealed from gross ignorance and darkness to a purer morality and greater light. His was a movement of progress. Smith, on the contrary, led back his followers from light to darkness, from freedom and a denial of priestly interference to despotism and priestly domination; his movement was essentially retrogressive, yet it is not to be doubted but that, cæteris paribus, the movement of the Prophet Smith has, if we take time into consideration, been much more successful than that of the Prophet Mahomet. Of old it was the fashion to call Mahomet a caitiff and a "devil's pandour." Modern enlightenment and Latitudinarianism have formed for him defenders, if not worshipers, in Carlyle and Emerson. Some few years ago we all regarded Joe Smith as a speculating rogue without conscience or principle. But it is reserved for to-day to find in Captain Burton and a Saturday Reviewer gentlemen who will persist in seeing genius, earnestness, and zeal, where simpler people could only see roguery and crime.

In addition to this, in spite of clergymen and preachers, enlightened editors, middle-class education examinations, colleges, constant refutations, and exposures, Mormonism flourishes. The vis stultitiae, when once set in motion, is harder to overcome than the vis inertia. When you once set a people thinking wrongly, it is impossible to say where they will stop. They go onward with a pig-headed determination which gains strength at every step. If they once pause to look back over the long, awkward, and difficult journey they have made, they again start forward with a terrible determination not to retrace a single footstep. It is impossible to reason with them; for have they not been taught that their own inspired (?) reason is superior to any other? They commit a thousand follies; but these merely bind them to their course, and so they hurry onward, like the herd of swine into which the Saviour had permitted the devils to enter, downwards, ever downwards, till the yeasty waves of destruction close over them for ever. Not without reason, therefore, has the anathema of the Church been pronounced against those who first set an error in motion; not without reason do we pray to be delivered from heresy and schism; not without reason do we pray for those to whom God has given a strong delusion, so that they should believe a lie; nor without reason do we try to guard ourselves against the wiles of the Devil, as the father of lies.

If the temper of the times has changed with regard to this giant error of a few summers' growth, we may at least allow that there is cause for this change. A few years ago the cloud was no bigger than a