ill, as I take it, does not change men and women. It but develops their
characters. As there are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he
does not know till he takes up the pen to write, so the heart is a secret
even to him (or her) who has it in his own breast. Who hath not found
himself surprised into revenge, or action, or passion, for good or evil;
whereof the seeds lay within him, latent and unsuspected, until the
occasion called them forth? With the death of her lord, a change seemed to
come over the whole conduct and mind of Lady Castlewood; but of this we
shall speak in the right season and anon.

The lords being tried then before their peers at Westminster, according to
their privilege, being brought from the Tower with state processions and
barges, and accompanied by lieutenants and axe-men, the commoners engaged
in that melancholy fray took their trial at Newgate, as became them; and,
being all found guilty, pleaded likewise their benefit of clergy. The
sentence, as we all know, in these cases is, that the culprit lies a year
in prison, or during the king's pleasure, and is burned in the hand, or
only stamped with a cold iron; or this part of the punishment is
altogether remitted at the grace of the sovereign. So Harry Esmond found
himself a criminal and a prisoner at two-and-twenty years old; as for the
two colonels, his comrades, they took the matter very lightly. Duelling
was a part of their business; and they could not in honour refuse any
invitations of that sort.

But the case was different with Mr. Esmond. His life was changed by that
stroke of the sword which destroyed his kind patron's. As he lay in
prison, old Dr. Tusher fell ill and died; and Lady Castlewood appointed
Thomas Tusher to the vacant living; about the filling of which she had a
thousand times fondly talked to Harry Esmond: how they never should part;
how he should educate her boy; how to be a country clergyman, like saintly
George Herbert, or pious Dr. Ken, was the happiness and greatest lot in
life; how (if he were obstinately bent on it, though, for her part, she
owned rather to holding Queen Bess's opinion, that a bishop should have no
wife, and if not a bishop why a clergyman?) she would find a good wife for
Harry Esmond: and so on, with a hundred pretty prospects told by fireside
evenings, in fond prattle, as the children played about the hall. All
these plans were overthrown now. Thomas Tusher wrote to Esmond, as he lay
in