Notes and Queries, Number 36, July 6, 1850 | Page 7

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JAMES H. FRISWELL.
* * * * *
A NOTE OF ADMIRATION!
Sir Walter Scott, in a letter to Miss Johanna Baillie, dated October 12,
1825, (Lockhart's _Life of Sir W. S._, vol. vi. p. 82.), says,--
"I well intended to have written from Ireland, but alas! as some stern
old divine says, 'Hell is paved with good intentions.' There was such a
whirl of laking, and boating, and wondering, and shouting, and
laughing, and carousing--" [He alludes to his visiting among the
Westmoreland and Cumberland lakes on his way home, especially] "so
much to be seen, and so little time to see it; so much to be heard, and
only two ears to listen to twenty voices, that upon the whole I grew
desperate, and gave up all thoughts of doing what was right and proper
on post-days, and so all my epistolary good intentions are gone to
Macadamise, I suppose, 'the burning marle' of the infernal regions."
How easily a showy absurdity is substituted for a serious truth, and
taken for granted to be the right sense. Without having been there, I
may venture to affirm that "Hell is not paved with good intentions, such
things being all lost or dropt on the way by travellers who reach that
bourne;" for, where "Hope never comes," "good intentions" cannot
exist any more than they can be formed, since to fulfil them were
impossible. The authentic and emphatical figure in the saying is, "The
road to hell is paved with good intentions;" and it was uttered by the
"stern old divine," whoever he might be, as a warning not to let "good
intentions" miscarry for want of being realized at the time and upon the
spot. The moral, moreover, is manifestly this, that people may be going
to hell with "the best intentions in the world," substituting all the while
_well-meaning_ for _well-doing_.
J.M.G

Hallamshire.
* * * * *
THE EARL OF NORWICH AND HIS SON GEORGE LORD
GORING.
As in small matters accuracy is of vital consequence, let me correct a
mistake which I made, writing in a hurry, in my last communication
about the two Gorings (Vol. ii., p. 65.). The Earl of Norwich was not
under sentence of death, as is there stated, on January 8, 1649. He was
then a prisoner: he was not tried and sentenced till March.[2]
The following notice of the son's quarrels with his brother cavaliers
occurs in a letter printed in Carte's bulky appendix to his bulky Life of
the Duke of Ormond. As this is an unread book, you may think it worth
while to print the passage, which is only confirmatory of Clarendon's
account of the younger Goring's proceedings in the West of England in
1645. The letter is from Arthur Trevor to Ormond, and dated
Launceston, August 18, 1645.
"Mr. Goring's army is broken and all his men in disorder. He hates the
council here, and I find plainly there is no love lost; they fear he will
seize on the Prince, and he, that they will take him: what will follow
hereupon may be foretold, without the aid of the wise woman on the
bank. Sir John Colepeper was at Court lately to remove him, to the
discontent of many. In short, the war is at an end in the West; each one
looks for a ship, and nothing more.
"Lord Digby and Mr. Goring are not friends; Prince Rupert yet goes
with Mr. Goring, but how long that will hold, I dare not undertake,
knowing both their constitutions."
It will be observed that the writer of the letter, though a cavalier, here
calls him _Mr. Goring_, when as his father was created Earl of
Norwich in the previous year, he was Lord Goring in cavalier
acceptation.

He is indiscriminately called Mr. Goring and Lord Goring in passages
of letters by cavaliers relating to the campaign in the West of 1645,
which occur in Carte's Collection of Letters (vol. i. pp. 59, 60. 81. 86.).
A number of letters about the son, Lord Goring's proceedings in the
West in 1645 are printed in the third volume of Mr. Lister's Life of Lord
Clarendon.
The Earl of Norwich's second son, Charles, who afterwards succeeded
as second earl, commanded a {87} brigade under his brother in the
West in 1645. (Bulstrode's _Memoirs_, p. 142.; Carte's _Letters_, i.
116. 121.)
Some account of the father, Earl of Norwich's operations against the
parliament in Essex in 1648, is given in a curious autobiography of
Arthur Wilson, the author of the History of James I., which is printed in
Peck's _Desiderata Curiosa_, book xi. part 5. Wilson was living at the
time in Essex.
An interesting fragment of a letter from Goring the son to the Earl of
Dorset, written apparently as