On this occasion he warned his parishioners against assuming that sudden death is a judgment.  ’On the contrary, the ancients held it a blessing; and Pliny declares it to be the greatest happiness of life—­how much more should we?  Many of the Roman worthies, as you are aware, perished thus suddenly, Quintius AEmilius Lepidus, going out of his house, struck his great toe against the threshold and expired; Cneius Babius Pamphilus, a man of praetorian rank, died while asking a boy what o’clock it was; Aulus Manlius Torquatus, a gentleman of consular rank, died in the act of taking a cheese-cake at dinner; Lucius Tuscius Valla, the physician, deceased while taking a draught of mulsum; Appius Saufeius, while swallowing an egg:  and Cornelius Gallus, the praetor, and Titus Haterius, a knight, each died while kissing the hand of his wife.  And I might add many more names with which, no doubt, you are equally familiar.’

The gentlemen of the household opened their eyes; the officers of the Royal Irish Artillery, who understood their man, winked pleasantly behind their cocked hats at one another; and his excellency coughed, with his perfumed pocket-handkerchief to his nose, a good deal; and Master Dicky Sturk, a grave boy, who had a side view of his excellency, told his nurse that the lord lieutenant laughed in church! and was rebuked for that scandalum magnatum with proper horror.

Then the good doctor told them that the blood of the murdered man cried to heaven.  That they might comfort themselves with the assurance that the man of blood would come to judgment.  He reminded them of St. Augustan’s awful words, ‘God hath woollen feet, but iron hands;’ and he told them an edifying story of Mempricius, the son of Madan, the fourth king of England, then called Britaine, after Brute, who murdered his brother Manlius, and mark ye this, after twenty years he was devoured by wild beasts; and another of one Bessus—­’tis related by Plutarch—­who having killed his father, was brought to punishment by means of swallows, which birds, his guilty conscience persuaded him, in their chattering language did say to one another, that Bessus had killed his father, whereupon he bewrayed his horrible crime, and was worthily put to death.  ‘The great Martin Luther,’ he continued, ’reports such another story of a certain Almaigne, who, when thieves were in the act of murdering him, espying a flight of crows, cried aloud, “Oh crows, I take you for witnesses and revengers of my death.”  And so it fell out, some days afterwards, as these same thieves were drinking in an inn, a flight of crows came and lighted on the top of the house; whereupon the thieves, jesting, said to one another, “See, yonder are those who are to avenge the death of him we despatched t’other day,” which the tapster overhearing, told forthwith to the magistrate, who arrested them presently, and thereupon they confessed, and were put to death.’  And so he went on, sustaining his position with strange narratives culled here and there from the wilderness of his reading.