in public life may have entitled them.  Have not all impartial biographers and historians acted on this principle?  And shall I be deterred from following so just and salutary an example?  If when death has set his seal upon a man’s actions, and when the evil which he has committed is irremediable, the voice of censure is still to be silent, when, I may ask, ought it to be heard?  Had such an ill-judged forbearance been practised by historians, would the world have known that any tyrants, except those who may exist at the present epoch, or who may have existed within the reach of memory or of tradition, ever infested the earth?  Would not the enormities of the Dionysii, of Caligula, and of Nero, have been long since forgotten?  And would not many of those princes who have merited and obtained the appellations of “great,” of “good,” and of “just,” have become as atrocious monsters as these were, but from the dread of being held up as objects of similar execration to posterity?  The tyrant, indeed, whose conduct I would stamp with merited detestation, moved, fortunately for the interests of mankind, in a humbler sphere, and therefore, his atrocities have a greater tendency to sink into premature oblivion.  But is it a less sacred duty to take all such steps as may be calculated to deter his successors from treading in his footsteps; because they will only have thousands to trample upon instead of millions?  Ought not oppression in every community, whether great or small, to be discouraged by every possible means?  And what means are so likely to effect this end, and to prevent these secondary tyrants from sneaking out of the pages of record and recollection, as to project their memories red-hot from the sun of public indignation, with a long fiery train of inextinguishable ignominy, which may serve to point out their tracks; and to render them for ever glaring objects of dread and execration, not only to the planet of which they may have proved the bane, but to the whole system encircled by their orbits?  In persevering, therefore, in the remarks which I made on this man’s actions when he was living, it is my conscientious belief that I have only acquitted myself of an imperative duty; and that I should have been guilty of a gross dereliction of it, had I done otherwise.  On this conviction, unalloyed by any baser impulse, I rest the defence of my conduct; should there be any of my readers, who may be inclined to view it in the same unjustifiable light as it is regarded by some few of my friends.]

[*** See Lieutenant-Colonel Johnstone’s court-martial.]

The instance of this man’s conduct, is, I am willing to allow, an aggravated one, and such as it is to be hoped for the honour of our species would be rarely repeated.  That it has occurred is, however, sufficient to demonstrate the impropriety of confiding unlimited power to any individual in future.  The mere possession, indeed, of such vast authority, is calculated to vitiate the heart,