These lectures are printed precisely as they were written for delivery. I trust that they will explain themselves as they go along and need no further advance elucidation in a preface. My title is plagiarism naked and unashamed. It comes from a book I read in my Victorian boyhood, a story by Sir Walter Besant about the Monmouth rebellion, in which the chief characters either perished at Sedgmoor or were haled before Judge Jeffreys and transported to the West Indies. The details of the story I have long ago forgotten, but the title has always lingered in my memory as a felicitous phrase, and it so aptly describes the theme of these lectures that I have no hesitation in appropriating and reviving it.

L.H.