Dr. Lloyd replied--"The limited power which a general possesses over troops, who, in obeying him, have cancelled the previous obligations of duty and conscience. He who accepts the command of a revolutionary army is ever fearful of being sacrificed by his own soldiers. His office makes him the ostensible champion of liberty; but his army claim a greater licence than consists with the requisite exercise of discipline and authority. His subordinate officers envy his supremacy; for the chain of prescriptive gradation is dissolved by the pretext of preferring merit; and what soldier of fortune is there who does not think himself equal to the highest posts which his machinations and enterprize can procure. We Loyalists (for such, Sir, I now in confidence own myself to be) have often said that Lord Bellingham was only half wicked. He retained too much of the gentleman to practise extortion, or to connive at the rapacity by which his subalterns tried to make the most of their brief authority. He enforced discipline without condescending to that familiarity and occasional indulgence which make severity palatable. He was an agent of the new system, trying to introduce the manners of the old. He saw his own danger when it was too late. He discovered that he served villains who, despising honest praise, renounced every honourable bond of amity, to whom treachery and cruelty were become habitual; and that he commanded desperadoes, who, setting no value on their own lives, kept his in their power. Such, Sir, was the state of your father's army, and such the secret hostility of those for whom he fought. You may condemn his embarking in their cause, his timidity, his irresolution, his fluctuating variableness, but not his deliberate cruelty or private malice. After Eustace had drawn the lot of death, the power of the general could not save him from an army lost to every generous feeling, and thirsting for revenge." To know that his father had rather been guilty of the transgressions of frail man than of the horrible enormities of a demon, was an invaluable consolation to De Vallance. But still Eustace had fallen under the sentence of Bellingham, and himself consequently been banished from Isabel. Dr. Lloyd interrupted his mournful reverie by inquiring what were his future views. "When you described Eustace going to execution," returned he, "you appealed to the sympathy of a heart eternally separated from the object of a pure, cherished affection. Read that letter. Conceive it written by a woman whose beauty is her smallest praise, and then advise me how to bestow the unvalued remnant of a life which must be spent in exile from her." Dr. Lloyd perused Isabel's farewel, and inquired if her brother's death was the only obstacle to their union.