Brooding, in dire dejection, over his embarrassed affairs, he now beheld all with whom he was concerned, through the distorting medium of disappointed selfishness. He seems to have persuaded himself, that every repulse was an affront, every refusal an intentional injury, and every trouble the result of injustice. Stung with self-reproach, and infuriated by frustrated ambition, every object became tinctured with the disorder of his own mind. His wrongs were, in his own view, the greatest ever endured. His case demanded attention beyond all others. His claims wanted only to be known, to be acknowledged and allowed. He was not a man to seek the advice or follow the suggestions of a friend. An unbending haughtiness could choose only its own plans, and, when these failed, dwell in secret and foreboding contemplation on its sorrows.

In the mean time, as these dark passions were gathering strength, the religious feelings he had once known, and his resistance to which, when they were most powerful, we have already noticed, were rapidly losing their remaining influence on his conscience. He appears to have had no view of God's providence as ordering the events of human life; no conception of the virtues of patience and submission; no impression of the duty of the forgiveness of injuries; no recollection of the great resource to man in

trouble, the throne of God. His pious mother had long fallen a victim to afflictions occasioned chiefly by her unprincipled child, and could no longer present any impediments to the full tide of his malignant passions; and as these bore the sway, all memory of Christian repentance and faith, of humility and prayer, of resignation and hope, was obliterated. Let this part of his progress in sin be particularly remarked. Satan can drive no one to desperate measures, while any remembrance of that relief in trouble, that support in affliction, that consolation in sorrow, which are to be found in the grace of God in Christ Jesus, sheds a beam of light across his path. A practical disbelief of all the fundamental duties, resources, and hopes of Christianity, leaves the heart of man unprotected against the assaults and temptations of Satan.

After a long course of misfortunes, operating on a disposition so perverse and inflexible, and unchecked by the laws of religion; all his schemes of relieving his circumstances proving abortive, the government of his country of necessity resisting his unfounded claims, and the prospect of subsisting longer by address and speculation becoming daily more uncertain, the

the

5 She died at Liverpool, weighed down with trouble, in year 1802.

fell design of avenging his own wrongs may be supposed to have entered his breast. . That he at first rejected the thought with abhorrence, may be easily credited. He told me, indeed, he was a long time in making up his mind to it. Such a crime could not be easily resolved on, even by Bellingham. It must have taken no little time ere conscience could be quite silenced, ere the first principles of humanity could be extirpated, and all the dictates of morality and religion be spurned and trampled on. It must have been a work of some time, to have formed to himself a false and dreadful code of morals, in order to justify to himself the taking what he called justice into his own hands. The excuses with which his gloomy and acute mind would furnish him, could not all at once assume, even to his view, the weight and importance of truth. It may be doubted, even at last, strong as we know a delusion may become, whether he fully believed the lie on which he professed to repose. I feel assured that he was convinced in his conscience of the fallacy of his pleas, at least during some part of my conversation with him. If, however, we suppose them to have taken full possession of his mind; if we allow that the miserable, and hollow, and destestable pretence, of having no private malice against the minister whose death he meditated, of wishing to set an example to

statesmen in general, and of being capable of vindicating his deed before a jury of his countrymen, actually ruled and shackled his understanding, which I will not undertake absolutely to deny, then his case affords a still more melancholy proof of the dreadful evasions to which a rational being may at length resort, when the laws of God and man are once rejected, and the heart is resigned to the foul dictates of malice and revenge.

The diabolical project being once deliberately formed, he seems to have proceeded to its execution with a degree of calmness and obduracy to which I know of no parallel. The resolution of perpetrating the horrid deed appears to have so completely relieved him from the hesitations which the voice of nature and of conscience must have long interposed, that he could lend his mind to the most solemn or the most trifling of all engagements, according as the occasions of life brought them before him. On the day before the fatal crime, with the purpose of murder matured in his breast, he could be present twice, unmoved, at the public service of Almighty God; and the very hour before the murder, he could contribute to the amusement of the children of the house where

• At the Chapel of the Foundling Hospital.
Q

VOL. II.

he lodged, by conducting them to a public spectacle!

After the perpetration of the murder, we are not so much called upon to trace the progress of a further obduracy, his dreadful character being then fully developed, as to notice very briefly the methods by which he continued to resist the voice of truth, and died, as he lived, obstinate and insensible.

The perverse inflexibility of his character seems here to have had a principal influence. The deed was done, and he was resolved that nothing should prevent him from defending it. He was acute enough to see the consequences of an ingenuous confession to all his fallacious schemes of self-vindication. He had accordingly taken his ground, and there he obstinately stood; and the weakness of his allegations only increased the firmness by which he was determined to maintain them.

The gratification which his malignant disposition received from the revenge he had exacted, evidently had its weight. He appeared to me to conceal but very imperfectly the delight he felt at the complete success of his attempt, and to cherish with satisfaction the recollection of the warning he conceived he had given to public men.

Added to this, he was actuated by a love of applause, an affectation of distinction and notice. Horrid as the idea is, the letter he sent