the solemn protestations by which the King bound himself to
govern according to the law for the future, they never would have
joined his standard. But surely they underrated the public
danger. Falkland is commonly selected as the most respectable
specimen of this class. He was indeed a man of great talents and
of great virtues but, we apprehend, infinitely too fastidious for
public life. He did not perceive that, in such times as those on
which his lot had fallen, the duty of a statesman is to choose
the better cause and to stand by it, in spite of those excesses
by which every cause, however good in itself, will be disgraced.
The present evil always seemed to him the worst. He was always
going backward and forward; but it should be remembered to his
honour that it was always from the stronger to the weaker side
that he deserted. While Charles was oppressing the people,
Falkland was a resolute champion of liberty. He attacked
Strafford. He even concurred in strong measures against
Episcopacy. But the violence of his party annoyed him, and drove
him to the other party, to be equally annoyed there. Dreading the
success of the cause which he had espoused, disgusted by the
courtiers of Oxford, as he had been disgusted by the patriots of
Westminster, yet bound by honour not to abandon the cause, for
which he was in arms, he pined away, neglected his person, went
about moaning for peace, and at last rushed desperately on death,
as the best refuge in such miserable times. If he had lived
through the scenes that followed, we have little doubt that he
would have condemned himself to share the exile and beggary of
the royal family; that he would then have returned to oppose all
their measures; that he would have been sent to the Tower by the
Commons as a stifler of the Popish Plot, and by the King as an
accomplice in the Rye-House Plot; and that, if he had escaped