Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/119

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Charles Pelham Villiers.
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of persons." Possibly Logan has been blackened as much as the other has been whitened; and if Hume were to have tried his brush upon him he might have come out as a jolly good fellow, "strongly inclined to mirth and wine— though he apprehended[1] the Puritans' censure for his manner of life, free and disengaged."

The strange tragedy of Gowrie House was a story dark and terrible as that of Ugolino. The Torre della fame of Pisa did not witness a crime more horrible, more revolting, or more deserving of a terrible retribution than that perpetrated in the Black Turnpike in that old tower of Gowrie House at Perth. King James professed to take the "redacting noble houses, and men and women of noble blood, to slavish offices,"[2] to be one of his prerogatives granted by Holy Writ. James's practice was quite consonant with what Tacitus calls the mos regius in reference to the Emperor Tiberius. And with such a King as this James


  1. Johnson gives four meanings of the word apprehend, the fourth is probably the meaning used here "to think on with terror; to fear." Then what does Hume mean by "free and disengaged"?
  2. King James's Works, p. 199, folio, 1616.