deceiving himself, may think that while his ends are laudable, he ought not to hesitate concerning the means. Besides these more obvious temptations to prevarication, there is another which, though it may lie somewhat deeper, yet experience teaches us to be rooted in human nature: I mean that sort of obstinacy, or false shame, which makes men so unwilling to retract what they have once advanced, whether in matter of opinion or of fact. The general character of the man is also in this, as in all other human testimony, a circumstance of the greatest moment. Where none of the above-mentioned objections occur, and where therefore the weight of evidence in question is confessedly considerable, yet is it still liable to be balanced or outweighed by evidence in the opposite scale. Let Rumbold's declaration, then, be examined upon these principles, and we shall find that it has every character of truth, without a single circumstance to discredit it. He was so far from entertaining any hope of pardon, that he did not seem even to wish it; and indeed if he had had any such chimerical object in view, he must have known that to have supplied the government with a proof of the Rye House assassination plot, would be a more likely road at least, than a steady denial, to obtain it. He left none behind him for whom to entreat favour, or whose welfare or honour was at all affected by any confession or declaration he might make. If, in a prospective view, he was without temptation, so neither, if he looked back, was he fettered by any former declaration; so that he could not be influenced by that erroneous notion of consistency to which it may be feared that truth, even in the most awful moments, has in some cases been sacrificed. His timely escape in 1683 had saved him from the necessity of making any protestation upon the subject of his innocence at that time; and the words of the letter to Walcot are so far from containing such a protestation, that they are quoted (very absurdly, it is true) by Sir John Dalrymple as an avowal of guilt. If his testimony is free from these particular objections, much less is it impeached by his general character, which was that of a bold and daring man, who was very unlikely to feel shame in avowing what he had not been ashamed to commit, and who seems to have taken a delight in speaking bold truths, or at least what appeared to him to be such, without regarding the manner in which his hearers were likely to receive them. With respect to the last consideration, that of the opposite evidence, it all depends upon the veracity of men who, according to their own account, betrayed their comrades, and were actuated by the hope either of pardon or reward.