prayed, they would endeavour to have laws that might enable them to defend themselves.[418] In the parliament of Oxford, Sir Thomas Player made a violent speech, upon Fitzharris being withdrawn from the city jail, and sent to the Tower, with a view, as he contended, of stifling his evidence against the Duke of York and the Papists; and concluded by making a motion, which was carried, that if any judge, justice, or jury, should proceed upon him, and he be found guilty, they be declared guilty of his murder, and betrayers of the rights of the commons of England. In short, Sir Thomas Player was a hot-headed violent factionary; but Rouse, one of his dependants who suffered for the Rye-house plot, with his dying breath cleared Sir Thomas of any accession to that conspiracy; and declared, that he broke with Lord Shaftesbury, upon perceiving the violent plans which he agitated after his being freed from the Tower. _State Trials_, p. 750. Note IX. _Judas, that keeps the rebels' pension-purse; Judas, that pays the treason-writer's fee; Judas, that well deserves his name-sake's tree; Who at Jerusalem's own gates erects His college for a nursery of sects._--P. 329. Under the name of Judas, Dryden describes the famous Robert Ferguson, a native of Scotland, and, by profession, an independant preacher, and teacher of an academy at Islington.--_Ath. Ox._ Vol. II. p. 743. He was one of those dark, intriguing, subtile, and ferocious characters, that emerge into notice in times of turmoil and civil dissension, and whose appearance as certainly bodes revolution, as the gambols of the porpoise announce a tempest. Through the whole of his busy and desperate career, he appears to have been guided less by any principle, moral or political, than by the mere pleasure of dealing in matters deep and dangerous, and exerting his ingenuity to shake the quiet of the kingdom at the risk of his own neck. In organizing dark and bloody intrigues; in maintaining the courage of the zealots whom he engaged in them; in carrying on the mystic correspondence by which the different parts of the conspiracy were to be cemented and conjoined; in guarding against the risque of discovery, and, lastly, in effecting with nicety a hairbreadth escape when it had taken place,--all these perilous, dubious, and criminal manœuvres, at which the noble-minded revolt, and the peaceful are terrified, were the scenes in which the genius of Ferguson delighted to exert itself. When the magistracy of London was thrown into the hands of the crown, the charter annulled, and all means of accomplishing a revolution by the ancient existing authorities, were annihilated, such a character as Ferguson became of inestimable value to Shaftesbury, considering the new plans which he had in agitation, and the persons by whom they were to be accomplished. Accordingly, he shared much of that politician's confidence, while his influence, as a popular and violent preacher in the city, gave him