their graceful figures at his balls.  His wounded soldiers were charmed by the benignant courtesy with which he walked among their pallets, assisted while wounds were dressed by the hospital surgeons, and breakfasted on a porringer of the hospital broth.  While all was obedience and enthusiasm among the besiegers, all was disunion and dismay among the besieged.  The duty of the French lines was so well performed that no messenger sent by William was able to cross them.  The garrison did not know that relief was close at hand.  The burghers were appalled by the prospect of those horrible calamities which befall cities taken by storm.  Showers of shells and redhot bullets were falling in the streets.  The town was on fire in ten places at once.  The peaceful inhabitants derived an unwonted courage from the excess of their fear, and rose on the soldiers.  Thenceforth resistance was impossible; and a capitulation was concluded.  The armies then retired into quarters.  Military operations were suspended during some weeks; Lewis returned in triumph to Versailles; and William paid a short visit to England, where his presence was much needed.9

He found the ministers still employed in tracing out the ramifications of the plot which had been discovered just before his departure.  Early in January, Preston, Ashton and Elliot had been arraigned at the Old Bailey.  They claimed the right of severing in their challenges.  It was therefore necessary to try them separately.  The audience was numerous and splendid.  Many peers were present.  The Lord President and the two Secretaries of State attended in order to prove that the papers produced in Court were the same which Billop had brought to Whitehall.  A considerable number of judges appeared on the bench; and Holt presided.  A full report of the proceedings has come down to us, and well deserves to be attentively studied, and to be compared with the reports of other trials which had not long before taken place under the same roof.  The whole spirit of the tribunal had undergone in a few months a change so complete that it might seem to have been the work of ages.  Twelve years earlier, unhappy Roman Catholics, accused of wickedness which had never entered into their thoughts, had stood in that dock.  The witnesses for the Crown had repeated their hideous fictions amidst the applauding hums of the audience.  The judges had shared, or had pretended to share, the stupid credulity and the savage passions of the populace, had exchanged smiles and compliments with the perjured informers, had roared down the arguments feebly stammered forth by the prisoners, and had not been ashamed, in passing the sentence of death, to make ribald jests on purgatory and the mass.  As soon as the butchery of Papists was over, the butchery of Whigs had commenced; and the judges had applied themselves to their new work with even more than their old barbarity.  To these scandals the Revolution had put an end.  Whoever, after perusing the trials of Ireland and Pickering,