respectable suits unsoiled by the squalor of the gaol they had quitted, their plain bands giving them the air of divines, their high-crowned hats, their belts with the scabbards of their rapiers worn to defend them from bullies and cut-throats hired by his Grace of Monmouth — he who wore the purple on the death of a foreign prince — to slit the nose of so humble a rascal as a prayer) to be gazed at, hooted, pelted with filth and rough enough missiles, till their persecutors were weary; and above the whole the simple, beautiful, grand, blue summer sky contrasting with the jumble of buildings and people, the tumult, the noise, the dust of the outrageous scene below. There, with those dark, serene, sagacious faces, whose power we study in many a brown picture, their trimmed but ample beards, their hair divided in the middle, and allowed only to fall back in a w’ave from the broad brows, the brave men sat undaunted in their penance — fools gaped at them, thoughtless, licentious men mocked at them, enemies reviled them, but their firmness did not falter.
Roundheads, Fifth -monarchy men, sour-faced hypocrites, psalm-singing knaves, bitter Whigs — they dubbed them freely. Lazy Dorset, who was only animated when drunk, and the jester Sedley, whose unnatural vileness had nearly raised a riot in these streets one night of late, and whose sense of family honour was the sole ray of light that lingered round a far-fallen star, with other distinguished gentlemen in their white silk hose, their perukes, and their pouncet-boxes, stayed their morning’s course, grinned, swore, betted, flipped showers of groats, bird -shot, snuff, and bits of sweet biscuit (with which, after his Majesty’s example, they coaxed, tormented, and satiated the little spaniels at their heels) in the direction of those stubborn prisoners, stimulating another appetite of the not over-fed or disinterested mob, few of them Andrew Marvells, and rendered con- fusion worse confounded.
“Give us back our may-poles! Leave alone our merry footings on the grass, unless you want to rouse us until you swing at Tyburn!“
“What! do you think we’ll resign our fiddles and routs, our honest round oaths for your canting, snivelling prayers?“
“Better not burn your drawn-down mouths with our Christmas plum-porridge!“ jeeringly, vociferated the lusty, carnal mob.
“What! my men,” remonstrated Harris, bending down to them, and speaking in his clear, distinct voice, melodious in its gravity, “we wanted to give you bread from heaven.”
“Shut his mouth; gag him, lop him; the whining, lying, Praise-the-Lord or Praise-the-Devil!“ burst in scarlet, foaming fury from a large, swollen, towering figure on the outskirts.
That was the famous Tory-editor, Sir Roger, notorious for his shrewdness, his unscrupulousness, his want of scholarship and style, and his indecent triumph over his brow-beaten foes. Dorset and Sedley, and their trains, turn and aim their sneers and their flouts at their unphilosophical, unmagnanimous, hot, coarse friend; but the main body of the assembly do not swerve from the rogues in pillory, but deride them, insult them, cast contumely upon them, till these resolved brains begin to reel, and these stout hearts to sicken at the utter baseness of their humiliation.
“Let me in; I know one of the prisoners. I pray you suffer me to pass forward,” said Patience, in her modest, middle-class apparel, with her young, open, feeling, refined gentlewoman’s face; and she spoke on till she was hoarse, never giving way * to exhaustion, though nearly carried off her feet, or to keen sorrow and burning indignation at that spectacle. Yet, as they say the sight of the dead, recalls vividly the time and circumstances when the departed was first met, blotting out, as it were the daily associations, and the infinite changes of intervening years, so the chance of beholding Benjamin Harris, all unknown to him, thus elevated into a public gazing-stock, with the same June air around them, brought back to her mind in one flash, not her kind, careful husband, but the comely, strong young printer, to whom Mrs. Lucy introduced her long ago in the Mercers’ Gardens, who looked so often at her as they walked on the soft turf, through the bowery trees, in the balmy evening air, and who to satisfy his conscience or her imagined horrors, would walk all the way through the streets by her chair, until he bowed over her hand at her father’s door in Lombard Street.
Happily for Patience, with the half-careless good-humour, which, thank heaven, is wont to temper the brutality of all but inflamed and possessed crowds, the apprentices, linkmen, small tradesmen, curious or sorry women, as well as the more substantial and honourable representatives of the community, after venting sundry scurrilous jests on the persistence -with which the women stuck to the conventicles, and the Puritans, were inclined to admit her claims, and hustled her on to the very front of the platform. Still Harris, who was somewhat of an absent man at best, and who was relieving himself by looking up into the cloudless air, did not observe her, and his presence intervened between Patience and the scope of Janeways’ vision.
“I pray you, sir, suffer me to mount beside the prisoners; put me up writh them; I am one of them,” declared Patience, to the officer.
Now these officers, who were some of them relics of the Protector’s servants, had no great stomach for such a duty as they were in the act of performing. They could not help respecting the manly, orderly, upright charges that fell to their lot, and with whom they might have come in contact before in very different relative positions. They would occasionally presume to be lenient in their offices — witness the captain of the prison in Bedford’s licensing John Bunyan to stand with his blind daughter in his hand in the court or street selling laces to the passers-by, for the support of his destitute family. Patience’s request wras out of order, and, at the same time, a moderately kindly man, of a little more than official principle, saw a respectable, delicate young woman in a sad strait, liable to be trodden under foot, or perhaps, in her present grief to be spirited away and misused by the reckless and abandoned.
“It was not mooted by the magistrates, howsoever, there is no statute against it,” and so
gruffly in his perplexity, but far from barbarously,