of his wife; and when this lady was desired once more to enter the prison, she beheld her second husband headless in his coffin as she had her first! Such extraordinary incidents in so short a period overpowered the feeble frame of the sufferer; she died--leaving a son, who inherited the rich accession of fortune so fatally obtained by his injured and suffering mother. Such is the tale of which the party story of Kirk appeared to Ritson to have been a _rifacimento_; but it is rather the foundation than the superstructure. This critic was right in the general, but not in the particular. It was not necessary to point out the present source, when so many others of a parallel nature exist. This tale, universally told, Mr. Douce considers as the origin of _Measure for Measure_, and was probably some traditional event; for it appears sometimes with a change of names and places, without any of incident. It always turns on a soldier, a brother or a husband, executed; and a wife, a sister, a deceived victim, to save them from death. It was, therefore, easily transferred to Kirk, and Pomfret's poem of "Cruelty and Lust" long made the story popular. It could only have been in this form that it reached the historian, who, it must be observed, introduces it as a "story _commonly told_ of him;" but popular tragic romances should not enter into the dusty documents of a history of England, and much less be particularly specified in the index! Belleforest, in his old version of the tale, has even the circumstance of the "captain, who having seduced the wife under the promise to save her husband's life, exhibited him soon afterwards _through the window of her apartment suspended on a gibbet_." This forms the horrid incident in the history of "the bloody Colonel," and served the purpose of a party, who wished to bury him in odium. Kirk was a soldier of fortune, and a loose liver, and a great blusterer, who would sometimes threaten to decimate his own regiment, but is said to have forgotten the menace the next day. Hateful as such military men will always be, in the present instance Colonel Kirk has been shamefully calumniated by poets and historians, who suffer themselves to be duped by the forgeries of political parties![87]