COTTON himself believed that this apparently trivial incident cost him his life. He said not long before his death,—‘It has killed me.’ We shall probably never know whether DUDLEY’S tract had anything to do with bringing about in the mind of WENTWORTH that eventful change of political views which is known to have passed over it (about the time when the incriminated manuscript was sent so eagerly from hand to hand), and which, in a few years more, was to work his death also. But one can hardly avoid, in passing, a momentary thought on the curious possibility that a pamphlet, written at Florence, in the hope that it might save, for the writer, some wreck or remnant of a despoiled inheritance,—may have proved fatal alike to the close political friend of ELIOT, and to the close political friend of LAUD. A tract of such potency may well claim a few words about its contents. They bear in every line the stamp of mental energy, and also the stamp of moral recklessness. [Sidenote: CAREER OF SIR R. DUDLEY, (THE TRUE AUTHOR).] Sir Robert DUDLEY knew well enough that a rooted dislike of Parliaments was, in JAMES’S mind, combined with a besetting dread of them. He knew that, between hate and fear, a Parliament was like a nightmare, for ever crouching behind the royal pillow. It is the purpose of his tract to tell the King how to drive the nightmare away. He recommends, amongst other and minor measures, the erection of a strong fortress in all the chief towns of the Kingdom, to be manned by trained bands, and to be placed in such situations as shall command the high roads. In addition to these measures, your Majesty, he says, must set up a strict system of passports, for travellers. Nor is all this merely a new and more elaborate version of the old story of belling the cat. The writer of this counsel knows, perfectly, that already the King’s poverty is the Parliament’s power; and that to build fortresses and array soldiers needs a full purse, not an exhausted one. But he says,—as WENTWORTH said after him,—that soldiers can be set to work upon good hopes of the pay to come. A resolute King, he thinks, with resolute troops at his back, could do in England what had so often been done in Italy. He could tithe men’s estates. He could make salt and some other things of prime necessity a royal monopoly. He could set a tariff on dignities of honour. He could establish sumptuary laws, such as should make the vanity and jealousy of thriving nobodies—men with full pockets and blank pedigrees—willing contributors to the King’s Exchequer. He could buy up improvident leases of Crown lands, and resell them at a large profit.