Here, then, I unwillingly extinguish that long range of lights, which for many ages illuminated the house of Birmingham.

But I cannot extinguish the rascallity of the line of Northumberland.  This unworthy race, proved a scourge to the world, at least during three generations.  Each, in his turn, presided in the British cabinet; and each seems to have possessed the villainy of his predecessor, united with his own.  The first, only served a throne; but the second and the third intended to fill one.  A small degree of ambition warms the mind in pursuit of fame, through the paths of honor; while too large a portion tends to unfavorable directions, kindles to a flame, consumes the finer sensations of rectitude, and leaves a stench behind.

Edmund, the father of this John, was the voracious leech, with Empson, who sucked the vitals of the people, to feed the avarice of Henry the Seventh.

It is singular that Henry, the most sagacious prince since the conquest, loaded him with honours for filling the royal coffers with wealth, which the penurious monarch durst never enjoy:  but his successor, Henry the Eighth, enjoyed the pleasure of consuming that wealth, and executed the father for collecting it!  How much are our best laid schemes defective?  How little does expectation and event coincide?  It is no disgrace to a man that he died on the scaffold; the question is—­What brought him there?  Some of the most inoffensive, and others the most exalted characters of the age in which they lived, have been cut off by the axe, as Edward Plantagenet, Earl of Warwick, for being the last male heir of the Anjouvin Kings; John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester, Sir Thomas Moore, Sir Walter Raleigh, Algernon Sidney, William Lord Russell, &c. whose blood ornamented the scaffold on which they fell.

The son of this man, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, favorite of Queen Elizabeth, is held up by our historians as a master-piece of dissimulation, pride, and cruelty.  He married three wives, all which he is charged with sending to the grave by untimely deaths; one of them, to open a passage to the Queen’s bed, to which he aspired.  It is surprising, that he should deceive the penetrating eye of Elizabeth:  but I am much inclined to think she knew him better than the world; and they knew him rather to well.  He ruined many of the English gentry, particularly the ancient family of Arden, of Park-hall, in this neighbourhood:  he afterwards ruined his own family by disinheriting a son, more worthy than himself.—­If he did not fall by the executioner, it is no proof that he did not deserve it.—­We now behold

JOHN, DUKE OF NORTHUMBERLAND, 1537,

Lord of the manor of Birmingham; a man, who of all others the least deserved that honor; or rather, deserved the axe for being so.