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

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 he was on the point of retiring into France, and dated Pondesfred, January 26, 1646, is printed in Mr. Eliot Warburton's _Memoirs of Prince Rupert_, iii. 215.
Mr. Warburton, by the way, clearly confounds the father with the son when he speaks of the Earl of Norwich's trial and reprieve (iii. 408.). Three letters printed in Mr. W.'s second volume (pp. 172. 181, 182.), and signed "Goring", are probably letters of the father's, but given by Mr. Warburton to the son.
I perceive also that Mr. Bell, the editor of the lately published _Fairfax Correspondence_, has not avoided confusion between the father and son. In the first volume of the correspondence relating to the civil war (p. 281.), the editor says, under date