killed in cold blood two more men who had innocently provoked his
enmity, "as if increase of appetite did grow by that it fed on," until
he rightly became the most dreaded and hated man in all England, a man
to whom a glance, a gesture, or a harmless word might mean death.

But his evil days were drawing to their end; and appropriately he died
in a welter of innocent blood. When the Duke of Hamilton was appointed
Ambassador to the French Court, the Whigs were so alarmed by his known
partiality for the Pretender that the more unscrupulous of them decided
that, at any cost, he must be got rid of. What simpler plan could there
be than by provoking him to a duel; what fitter tool than the
fire-eating, bloodthirsty Mohun, the most skilled swordsman of his day?

Mohun jumped at the vile suggestion, and lost no time in seeking the
Duke and insulting him in public. His Grace, however, who knew the man's
reputation only too well, treated the insult with the silence and
contempt it deserved; whereupon Mohun, roused to fury by this studied
slight, changed his _rôle_ to that of challenger. Thrice he sent his
second, one Major-General Macartney, almost as big a scoundrel as
himself, to the Duke's house in St James's Square; the fourth time a
meeting was arranged for the following morning at the Ring, in Hyde
Park, a favourite duelling-ground of the time. The intervening night
hours Mohun and his satellite spent in debauchery in a low house of
pleasure.

In the cold, grey dawn of the following morning--the morning of 15th
November 1712--the principals and seconds appeared almost simultaneously
at the Ring--in the daytime the haunt of beauty and fashion, in the
early morning hours a desolate part of the Park--and the preliminaries
were quickly arranged. Turning to Macartney, the Duke said: "I am well