which it impressed on the heart of the people may be understood a little by the fact, that in no country so much as in England the peculiar sacredness of Monarchy has since been carried so far. The impression caused by his death was so profound, that, forty years afterwards, when his son was arrested in his flight, the only thing that during the whole course of that revolution caused the least reaction in his favour was (according to the Whig Burnet) the fear that the people conceived that the same thing was going to be acted over again, and men remembered that saying of King Charles—"The prisons of princes are not far from their graves." He walked across the park from the garden at St. James’s that January morning with so firm and quick a pace that the guards could scarcely keep the step, and stepping from his own banqueting house upon the scaffold, where the men who ruled England had so little understood him as to provide ropes and pulleys to drag him down in case of need, he died with that calm and kingly bearing which none could assume so well as he, and by his death he cast a halo of religious sentiment round a cause which, without the final act, would have wanted much of its pathetic charm, and struck that keynote of religious devotion to his person and the Monarchy which has not yet ceased to reverberate in the hearts of men. "That thence the royal actor borne The tragic scaffold might adorn, While round the armed bands Did clap their bloody hands: He nothing common did, nor mean, Upon that memorable scene; But with his keener eye The axe’s edge did try; Nor called the gods with vulgar spite To vindicate his helpless right, But bowed his comely head Down, as upon a bed." _The Republican, Andrew Marvell._ *CHAPTER XV.*