might conceive that Godfrey was probably slain, as Macaulay thought,
by hotheaded Catholics. But I confess to a leaning in favour of the
picture of Godfrey sketched by L'Estrange; of the man confessing to
hereditary melancholy; fretted and alarmed by the tracasseries and
perils of his own position, alarming his friends and endangering
himself by his gloomy hints; settling, on the last night of his life
(Friday, October 11), with morbid anxiety, some details of a parish
charity founded by himself; uncertain as to whether he can dine with
Welden (at about one) next day; seen at that very hour near his own
house, yet dining nowhere; said to have roamed, before that hour, to
Paddington Woods and back again; seen vaguely, perhaps, wandering
near Primrose Hill in the afternoon, and found dead five days later
in the bush-covered ditch near Primrose Hill, his own sword through
his breast and back, his body in the attitude of one who had died a
Roman death.

Between us and that conclusion--suicide caused by fear--nothing
stands but the surgical evidence, and the grounds of that evidence
are disputed.

Surgical evidence, however, is a fact 'that winna ding,' and I do
not rely on the theory of suicide. But, if Godfrey was murdered by
Catholics, it seems odd that nobody has suggested, as the probable
scene, the Savoy, which lay next on the right to Somerset Yard. The
Savoy, so well described by Scott in Peveril of the Peak, and by
Macaulay, was by this time a rambling, ruinous, labyrinth of lanes
and dilapidated dwellings, tenanted by adventurers and skulking
Catholics. It was an Alsatia, says Macaulay, more dangerous than
the Bog of Allen, or the passes of the Grampians. A courageous
magistrate might be lured into the Savoy to stop a fight, or on any