Neither Hume nor Clarendon, I believe, mentions the persecution of Archbishop Leighton's father by the Prelatical party of his day; and yet it was one of their worst acts, and that which most excited wrath and indignation against the Primate--so faithful is their portrait of those times! Never can I read Mr. Wordsworth's sublime sonnet to Laud, especially the lines,
Prejudged by foes determined not to spare, An old weak man for vengeance laid aside,
without thinking of another "old weak man for vengeance laid aside"--of Laud in the day of his power pulling off his hat and thanking God for the inhuman sentence that had been passed upon the already wasted victim[135]--of the miserable den to which the mangled man was committed for life after that sentence had been executed in all its multiplication and precision of barbarity--then calling to mind the words of our Saviour, _They that take the sword shall perish with the sword_, and _Blessed are the merciful for they shall obtain mercy_. It was not _mercy_ alone that was violated by these acts--but law and justice; and if he who instigated and rejoiced in them received neither justice nor mercy in his turn, is he worthy of the sacred name of _Martyr_? May we not say that the _vengeance_ which fell upon this persecutor was the Lord's vengeance, even if it came to pass by evil instruments, and fell upon a head already bowed down, and in some respects a noble one? Can the _glory and honour_ of meeting death with firmness,--nay even with "sublime" piety, cast its beams backward and bathe in one pure luminous flood a life darkened with such deep shadows, as those that chequer the sunshine of Laud's career?--the parts really brightened with the light of heaven? Plainness, sincerity, integrity, learning, munificence to a cause[136]--can virtues like these outweigh or neutralize such faults of head, heart, and temper, as lie to the charge of this Bishop in the church of Christ? As well might we set the cold bright morning dews, that rest on the stony crown of Vesuvius, against the burning lava that bursts from its crater, and expect them to quench the fire or reduce it to a moderate heat. _Some_ abatement must be made from the guilt of his violences from consideration of the _times_; but to subtract the whole on that account, or even to make light of it, is surely too much to make moral good and evil dependent on circumstance. What? Have Arundel, Bonner, Gardiner little or nothing to answer for? Was there ever yet a persecutor that persecuted from mere _speculative_ inhumanity? Even through Clarendon's account we may discern, I think, that Laud's private passions, in part at least, engaged him in the cause of Intolerance. He had been exasperated, before he attained power, by Puritan molestations and oppositions,--he became the persecutor of Puritans after he attained it; as schoolboys that have been tormented while they were in a low form, torment in their turn when they get into a high one,--not their tormentors but unfortunates who represent them to their imagination. An eminently good and wise man is above his _times_, if not in all, yet in many things; but Laud was the very impersonation of his times--the impersonated spirit of his age and his party. (Compare his over ceremonious consecration of St. Catherine's Church, gloated over by Hume, with Archdeacon Hare's remarks on his neglect of his diocese, in _The Mission of the Comforter_.) They who are of that party still, who would still swathe religion by way of supporting it, and dizen by way of dressing it, and gaze with fond regretful admiration upon the giant forms of Spiritual Despotism and Exaggerated Externalism, as they loom shadowy and magnificent through the vapoury vista of ages, to them no wonder that he is a giant too. And there are others, far above that or any other _party_, who in their love and zeal for the Church, abstract the how and the why of Laud's public warfare, and see him abstractedly as the Champion of the Church of England. "God knows my heart," says Mr. Coleridge, (in a marginal note on Mr.