288

HTSTOKY OF ENGLAND.

CHAP.

XVIII.

1692 .

unabashed front which are the first qualifications for the officeof a false accuser. A friendship, if that word may be soused,sprang up between the pair. Oates opened his house and evenhis purse to Fuller. The veteran sinner, both directly andthrough the agency of his dependents, intimated to the novicethat nothing made a man so important as the discovering of aplot, and that these were times when a young fellow who wouldstick at nothing and fear nobody might do wonders. The Re-volution, — such was the language constantly held by Titus andhis parasites, — had produced little good. The brisk boys ofShaftesbury had not been recompensed according to theirmerits. Even the Doctor, such was the ingratitude of men, waslooked on coldly at the new Court. Tory rogues sate at thecouncil board, and were admitted to the royal closet. It wouldbe a noble feat to bring their necks to the block. Above all, itwould be delightful to see Nottingham’s long solemn face onTower Hill. For the hatred with which these bad men regardedNottingham had no bounds, and was probably excited less byhis political opinions, in which there was doubtless much tocondemn, than by his moral character, in which the closestscrutiny will detect little that is not deserving of approbation.Oates, with the authority which experience and success entitlea preceptor to assume, read his pupil a lecture on the art ofbearing false witness. “ You ought, ” he said, with many oathsand curses, “to have made more, much more, out of what youheard and saw at Saint Germains. Never was there a finer foun-dation for a plot. But you are a fool: you are a coxcomb: Icould beat you: I would not have done so. I used to go toCharles and tell him his own. I called Lauderdale rogue to hisface. I made King, Ministers, Lords, Commons, afraid ofme. But you young men have no spirit.” Fuller was greatlyedified by these exhortations. It was, how'ever, hinted to himby some of his associates that, if he meant to take up the trade