the Founders of Massachusetts, then drawing near to Boston, that trial on the 4th of June, 1630, or this trial, two hundred and twenty-five years later? At the court of Charles it was a great honor to mutilate the body of a Puritan minister. [Footnote 30: 3 St. Tr. 383; Laud's Diary, 4th November; 2 Hallam, 28.] But not only did such judges thus punish the most noble men who wrote on political matters, there was no freedom of speech allowed--so logical is despotism! 7. William Prynn, a zealous Puritan and a very learned lawyer, wrote a folio against theatres called "a Scourge for Stage-Players," dull, learned, unreadable and uncommon thick. He was brought to the Star-Chamber in 1632-3, and Chief Justice Richardson--who had even then "but an indifferent reputation for honesty and veracity"--gave this sentence: "Mr. Prynn, I do declare you to be a Schism-Maker in the Church, a Sedition-Sower in the Commonwealth, a wolf in sheep's clothing; in a word 'omnium malorum nequissimus'--[the wickedest of all scoundrels]. I shall fine him L10,000, which is more than he is worth, yet less than he deserveth; I will not set him at liberty, no more than a plagued man or a mad dog, who though he cannot bite, yet will he foam; he is so far from being a sociable soul that he is not a rational soul; he is fit to live in dens with such beasts of prey as wolves and tygers like himself; therefore I do condemn him to perpetual Imprisonment, as those monsters that are no longer fit to live among men nor to see light." "I would have him branded in the forehead, slit in the nose, and his ears cropped too." The sentence was executed the 7th and 10th of May, 1633.[31] But nothing intimidated, the sturdy man committed other offences of like nature, "obstructing" other "officers," and was punished again, and banished. But on the summoning of Parliament returned to England, and became powerful in that Revolution which crushed the tyrants of the time. [Footnote 31: 3 St. Tr. 561; 2 Hallam, 28, and his authorities. See also 2 Echard, 109, _et seq._, 124, _et seq._, 202, 368, 510; the remarks of Hume, Hist. ch. lii., remind me of the tone of the fugitive slave bill Journals of Boston in 1850-54.] 8. In 1685, James II. was in reality a Catholic. He wished to restore Romanism to England and abolish the work of the Reformation, the better to establish the despotism which all of his family had sought to plant. He was determined to punish such as spoke against the Papal Church, though no law prohibited such speaking. Judge Jeffreys, a member of the cabinet and favorite of the king, was at that time chief justice--abundantly fit for the work demanded of him. The pious and venerable Richard Baxter was selected for the victim. Let Mr. Macaulay tell the story.