he occasionally beguiled the way--the joy he expressed at hearing that he was to pass through Hadley, and see yet once before he died the flock whom, God knew, he had most heartily loved and truly taught--his encounter with the poor man who waited for him at the foot of the bridge with five small children, crying “God help and succour thee! as thou hast many a time succoured me and mine;”--his inquiry, when he came to the last of the alms-houses, after the blind man and woman that dwelt there; and his throwing his glove through the window for them with what money in it he had left--his calling one Soyce to him out of the crowd on Aldham Common, to pull off his boots and take them for his labour, seeing that “he had long looked for them;”--his exclaiming last of all with a loud voice, as though the moral of his life was conveyed in those parting words, “Good people, I have taught you nothing but God’s Holy Word, and those lessons that I have taken out of God’s blessed book, the Holy Bible; and I am come hither this day to seal it with my blood;”--these, and other incidents of the same story, combine so many touches of tenderness with so much firmness of purpose--so many domestic charities with so much heroism--such cheerfulness with such disaster, that if there is any character calculated to call forth all the sympathies of our nature, it is that of Rowland Taylor. God’s blessing is still generally seen on the third and fourth generation of them that love him; and if Rowland could have beheld the illustrious descendant which Providence was preparing for him in Jeremy Taylor, the antagonist of the Church of Rome, able after his own heart’s content--the first and best advocate of toleration--the greatest promoter of practical piety that has ever, perhaps, lived amongst us--he might have humbly imagined that God had not forgotten this his gracious dispensation in his own case; and had approved his martyrdom, by raising from his ashes a spirit more than worthy of his name.