ing Christians, he abandoned his military profession, 

 and having previously donated all his substance to 

 the poor, boldly entered the Roman Senate and ad- 

 dressing the members then in session denounced 

 these unjust and cruel laws, and demanded the im- 

 mediate cessation of their inhuman tyrannies. This 

 valiant stand, however, availed him nothing. Upon 

 his constant and persistent profession of the Chris- 

 tian faith, they wooed him, first, with promises of 

 future honors and more material advancement, but 

 finding him inflexible and not to be brought over, 

 they then resorted to torture, not sparing anything 

 which might express their cruelty or ennoble his 

 afliiction. And at last, when they found that neither 

 their blandishments, their threats nor their cruelties 

 moved him they procured his sentence to prison, 

 and on the following day had him drawn through 

 the city and beheaded, and thus this George was 

 invested with the glorious crown of martyrdom, 

 upon the tw^ty-third day of April, A. D. 290. 

 The nature and severity of the punishments which 

 are said to have been endured by this Saint in de- 

 fence of his faith and his fellow Christians, his vic- 

 torious encounter with a venomous Dragon upon 

 Dunsmere Heath, and of his subsequent return to 

 Coventry, where he became the father of Guy, the 

 famous Earl of Warwick, these can be believed or 

 not as the reader pleases. But if he be an English- 

 man, it were heresy of a damnable kind to deny 



