"O earth! cover not thou my blood. Job xvi. 18."
"Take away the wicked from before the King, and his throne shall be established in righteousness. Prov. xxiii. 5."
The unwarrantable inferences of the above inscription, and the spirit which dictated the exposure of it, removes the compassion that posterity would otherwise have felt for the parents of the innocent youth, whose situation was certainly not more pitiable than that of the relatives of the other persons killed on the same day. If we had a single doubt that the senior Allen became a tool of party after perusing the epitaph, the petition which he put into the King's own hands on the 5th of October will prove it beyond dispute. His cries for vengeance proceeded not from a broken spirit; such would have forgiven mankind long before a year and three months had elapsed.
"To his MAJESTY.
"The humble Petition of William Allen, the disconsolate father of William Allen, who was barbarously murdered on the 10th of May, 1768.
"Most gracious Sovereign,
"Your Petitioner thinks it his duty to lay before your Majesty, with great humility, a short account of the unprovoked and outrageous murder committed by a Scotch officer, and three soldiers
of the same regiment, upon the innocent body of your Petitioner's only son: a youth that, all who knew him are ready to attest, was perfectly sober, temperate, humane, dutiful to his parents, and a sincere lover and worshiper of his God. It was a murder of so complicated a die, and attended by so many barbarous and cruel circumstances, as can hardly be paralleled in any former age, and is a disgrace to the present, which was proved to a demonstration, before an honest impartial Jury summoned by the Coroner, and the officer and soldiers brought in guilty of Wilful Murder ; yet, by the powerful interposition of the great, and the artful and sinister means of some of your Majesty's Justices, who ordered the soldiers to fire, and suffered one of the murderers to make his escape, and the others have been screened from the punishment they so justly deserved; and, as your Petitioner has been informed, some of them rewarded for committing this most execrable crime.
"That if your most gracious Majesty, the father of your people, would permit your unhappy Petitioner to lay the whole state of his case before you, he is well persuaded your Majesty's fatherly heart would sympathise with the still bleeding agonies of the disconsolate parents of so amiable a child, snatched from them by the hands of ruffians in the bloom of youth and innocence; of a daughter who did not long survive the untimely