A ROYAL RETRIBUTION. 63 



wise than cause a most irregular disturbance amongst the con- 

 tiguous vegetable juices, which, forthwith beginning to ferment, 

 and rise, and consolidate around it, soon constitute again its 

 vegetable prison, a prison of no larger dimensions than the 

 narrow circle of an oak-apple, or a currant leaf-gall ? 



To follow up the above notable ideas, the peculiar tree of 

 England, her mighty oak, were certainly no unfitting instru- 

 ment for the punishment of England's erring potentates. Only 

 fancy, amongst others, the roistering spirit of the "merry 

 monarch' to have been condemned, in expiation of its in- 

 numerable naughtinesses, to wander, for nigh two hundred 

 summers, from leaf to leaf of the self- same tree, or a tree of 

 the same sort as that whereon he hung a fugitive. Or sup- 

 posing him by tin's time permitted to exchange for an animal 

 the vegetable form, think only of this animal king condemned 

 to play the insect in the oak-apple ; and perhaps on tin's oak- 

 apple day of 1849, mounted in his gilded prison on the beaver 

 of a round-hat royalist ! Then (oh, most crowning consumma- 

 of a royal retribution !) the gilded apple withers, and as the 

 juices perish on which its occupant regaled, the spirit of the 

 Stewart, whose very God was appetite, pines on starvation, dies 

 as much as spirit can, and revives only to animate another oak- 

 apple, and tread again the same tiny round of painted or 

 gilded penance. 



But a truce with fancy, and now for fact ; or perhaps we 

 should say rather for the probable instead of improbable con- 



