Weeks, months, and years passed away like a tale that is told; and on their passing we shall not pause, dear reader, for to say truth we should have little to relate, which in a work such as this would be pleasing to your ear. What satisfaction could you derive from pictures of a court full of venality and corruption?--What satisfaction would it be either to the writer or the reader to look into the pruriences of the most disgusting monarch that ever sat upon the English throne? We will not, therefore, attempt to paint him to you, either in his villanous efforts to crush the liberties of his people, and to establish the tyranny of prerogative upon the ruins of the English constitution; or, in his pitiful pedantry, erecting himself into an ecclesiastical judge, and setting himself up as the Pope of Great Britain. We will not represent him in his unjust and illiberal prodigality, stripping the crown of its wealth, robbing his subjects of their property, and despoiling the best servants of the state of their just reward, to bestow with a lavish and a thoughtless hand the plunder of the people upon the unworthy heads of base and ill-deserving favourites. We will not display him in his cold, fanatical cruelties, more horrible than the wildest excesses of passionate tyranny; we will not show him dangling with his upstart minions, in those sickening scenes which have caused not unreasonable suspicions of the most horrible crimes. We will leave the course of James I. to the page of history, where it remains a foul blot, which not all the blood and horrors of the great rebellion--of which it was the origin and cause--have been able to efface. If ever the sins of the fathers were, according to the unshakeable decree of the Almighty, visited upon the children, such was most strikingly the case in the destiny of the unhappy race which sprang from his loins. We must, however, touch upon some points affecting the fate of several of those whom we have brought upon the scene; and first we must conclude the sad tale of the conspirators. We shall do so, however, as briefly as possible; for this, too, is a matter of mere history, and only one or two of those personages lived to take part in the succeeding events. As the plague still raged in London, the judges met at Maidenhead to inquire into the case against the prisoners, and examinations were entered into of a very irregular character, which were succeeded by a special commission, the chief end and object of which seemed to be, to set every principle of law and justice at defiance, to trample out the last sparks of liberty and security, and to show the British people that they were quite at the mercy of a vain and vicious king.