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Tales and Trifles, from Blackwood's and Other Popular Magazines
Tales and Trifles from Blackwood's and Other Popular Magazines Author:William Mudford General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1849 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: Among the very few Englishmen who, during the existence of the Bastile, were inmates of its gloomy dungeons, was one named Miles Synder- comb. The date of his arrest appears from the following billet d'entrée : " Cejourd'hui, 17 Septembre, 1637, quatre heures après midi, est entré au Chateau de la Bastille par ordre di1 Roi, le Sieur Miles Syndercomb, Anglois de nation ; il avoit sur lui 12 louis, dont 9 en or, ut trois en monnoie blanche et grise ; plus une tabatière d'y roire, sur laquelle est le portrait d'une jeune femme, enrichi de diamuns; tout cela, selon usage, Hou est resté entre les mains. On a trouvé en outre dans la doublure de l'habit du dit Syndercombe, un manuscrit, de 102 pages in 8 ayant pour titre Charles 1. possesseur injuste de la couronne d'Angleterre. Tout cela a été brûlé ; et le prisonnier a déclaré ne savoir point écrire, c'est pourquoi il a signé d'une croix. " Signé X." This, probably, is the only document extant, recording the imprisonment of Syndercomb ; and when nearly a hundred and fifty years after, the walls of the Bastile were levelled to the dust, in tha name of Liberty, by an oppressed people, it wasfound, with other memorials of tyranny, among the archives of that terrific engine of court despotism -- an engine whose refined cruelties were at once the scourge and shame of a brave, enlightened, and mighty nation. Syndercomb was no freshman, no novice, inthe mysteries of durance. He had fled into the Low Countries, and thence to France, to avoid a repetition of these matters; but his evil genius still pursuing him, he found his way into the Bastile where he had ab...« less