The Monthly Chronicle Volume 1 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1838 edition. Excerpt: ... indicated the daring of his character; the sharp bones, hard clear skin, and quick restless eye, showed the excitability of his temperament; while the habit, evidently a familiar one, of casting his looks at seasonable intervals upwards, as if appealing to Heaven, could leave no doubt that a pretended piety was the ordinary accompaniment of all his actions, or had been skilfully assumed and assiduously practised since necessity had rendered it advisable. If enthusiasm may be deemed to mean a self-abandonment in the pursuit of the object of that enthusiasm--and such is the meaning which, in the conventional employment of the word in the present day, is charitably assigned to it--he was no enthusiast. Religion might be made by him the pretence and the means, but worldly advantage was the object. In the less stormy transactions of life, he was the sort of man who would have said prayers three times a day in his family, and cheated all his neighbours in the interval; a course of practice unhappily not entirely ideal, as the notes of Lord Chief Justice Best, on a trial at Exeter, but too amply prove. Tyler seems to have been the most active, though not in rank the most important of Thom's followers. His positive participation in the murder of his relative, was proved by the following circumstances: On the 29th of May, when Thom had been marching his men up and down the country, Tyler said to him," Sir William, I heard a man say the other night that you were a fool and a madman, and that he should have no objection to take you." To which Thom answered, " I am at leisure now, if any man comes to take me I shall try my arm. I can clap my right hand on my left arm and slay 10,000 men. If the constables come I will cut them down like grass." On the 31st...