e of his
greatest need of her ministrations. He found consolation in dwelling on
her virtues and excellences in the Breviate of her life; "a paper
monument," he says, "erected by one who is following her even at the door
in some passion indeed of love and grief." In the preface to his
poetical pieces he alludes to her in terms of touching simplicity and
tenderness: "As these pieces were mostly written in various passions, so
passion hath now thrust them out into the world. God having taken away
the dear companion of the last nineteen years of my life, as her sorrows
and sufferings long ago gave being to some of these poems, for reasons,
which the world is not concerned to know; so my grief for her removal,
and the revival of the sense of former things, have prevailed upon me to
be passionate in the sight of all."

The circumstances of his trial before the judicial monster, Jeffreys, are
too well known to justify their detail in this sketch. He was sentenced
to pay a fine of five hundred marks. Seventy years of age, and reduced
to poverty by former persecutions, he was conveyed to the King's Bench
prison. Here for two years he lay a victim to intense bodily suffering.
When, through the influence of his old antagonist, Penn, he was restored
to freedom, he was already a dying man. But he came forth from prison as
he entered it, unsubdued in spirit.

Urged to sign a declaration of thanks to James II., his soul put on the
athletic habits of youth, and he stoutly refused to commend an act of
toleration which had given freedom not to himself alone, but to Papists
and sentries. Shaking off the dust of the Court from his feet, he
retired to a dwelling in Charter-House Square, near his friend
Sylvester's, and patiently awaited his deliverance. His death was quiet
and peaceful. "I have pain," he said to his friend Mather; "there is no
arguing against sense; but I have peace. I have peace." On being asked
how he did, he answered, in memorable words, "Almost well!"

He was buried in Christ Church, where the remains of his wife and her
mother had been placed. An immense concourse attended his funeral, of
all ranks and parties. Conformist and Non-conformist forgot the
bitterness of the controversialist, and remembered only the virtues and
the piety of the man. Looking back on his life of self-denial and
faithfulness to apprehended duty, the men who had persecuted him while
living wept over his grave. During the last