It was absurd to imagine that a man really heartbroken by remorse and shame for one act of perfidy would determine to lighten his conscience by committing a second act of perfidy as odious and as disgraceful as the first.

The promised atonement was so wicked and base that it never could be made by any man sincerely desirous to atone for past wickedness and baseness.

The truth was that, when Marlborough told the Jacobites that his sense of guilt prevented him from swallowing his food by day and taking his rest at night, he was laughing at them.

The loss of half a guinea would have done more to spoil his appetite and to disturb his slumbers than all the terrors of an evil conscience.

What his offers really proved was that his former crime had sprung, not from an ill regulated zeal for the interests of his country and his religion, but from a deep and incurable moral disease which had infected the whole man.