There was no more popular tribune in Guildhall.

Such was the commencement of a life so miserable that all the indignation excited by great faults is overpowered by pity.

A guilty passion, amounting to a madness, left on the moral character of the unhappy man a stain at which even libertines looked grave.

He tried to make the errors of his private life forgotten by splendid and perilous services to a public cause; and, having endured in that cause penury and exile, the gloom of a dungeon, the prospect of a scaffold, the ruin of a noble estate, he was so unfortunate as to be regarded by the party for which he had sacrificed every thing as a coward, if not a traitor.

Yet, even against such accumulated disasters and disgraces, his vigorous and aspiring mind bore up.