predictions, assuming a dangerous political character, and occasioning her to be followed by numerous malcontents, she was ordered up to London from Devonshire, and committed to prison, where she sate with a Bible in her hand, and her eyes fixed on heaven in a state of ecstatic abstraction. At

a little distance from her was another of the same sect, the crazy fanatic, James Naylor, the very nature of whose outrageous impiety declared him to be much better fitted for bedlam than a prison.*

* "The Divinity of Christ had been oppugned by Biddle, the Socinian, and now it was personated, (with reverence be it spoken,) by one James Naylor, a Quaker, who, resembling in his proportion and complexion, the pictures of Christ, had in all other things, as the setting of the beard and locks in the same fashion, dared to counterfeit our blessed Lord. To this purpose he had disciples and women ministering to him, whose blasphemous expressions and applications of several Scriptures relating properly to the loveliness and transcendent excellency of Christ (avOpazonaws) to this impostor, will, if repeated, move horror and trembling in every Christian. His first appearance in this manner was at Bristol, where a man leading his horse bareheaded, and one Dorcas Erbury and Martha Symonds going up to the knees in mire, by his horse's side, sung aloud, Holy, holy, holy, Hosanna! &c. For this they were seized by the magistrates, and being complained of to Parliament, were brought up to town, into which, as in all places, they entered singing the same blasphemies. At the Bar of the House, (a Committee having reported their opinion concerning his punishment), he was sentenced in December to be set in the pillory twice, and whipped twice, and his forehead to be stigmatized with the letter B. for Blas

They held no communion with one another, though of the same persuasion, each utterly denying the claims of the other. In different quarters of the ward were furious Anabaptists, addle-headed Fifthmonarchy-men, whose tenets inculcated the overthrow of all temporal authorities, to make way for the coming of the new Messiah and the Millennium; recusant papists and delinquents; military officers, who had opposed themselves to Cromwell's despotic supremacy, and who, with fierce looks, were canvassing in corners new plans for his over

phemer, and bored through the tongue, with which he used to answer to any question, THOU HAST SAID IT,' and the like. In prison, after his punishment, the impostor continued. One Mr. Rich, (a merchant of credit), that held him by the hand while he was in the pillories, with divers others, licked his wounds; the women were observed some to lay their head in his lap, lying against his feet; others to lean it upon his shoulders; and questionless, the Quakers would have persisted in this delusion, and set up and made something of this idol, if he had not been kept from them, (for as soon as ever they came into his company, they would first take him by the hand, and in a strange note say, 'Holy,' &c.) But being thus removed, after three days' wilful abstinence, having weakened himself even unto 'death, he begged some victuals, and then was set to work, which he performed, and came by degrees to himself and to reduction. At the return of the Rump he got his liberty, but survived it not; his additional pretended divinity having attenuated and wasted his humanity; and that body, sublimed and prepared for miracles, went the way of all flesh.-Heath's Chronicle, Part 3, p. 384.

throw; starving players, who had betaken themselves to the dangerous occupation of writing libels against the Government that had suppressed them; and the mongrel crew of rogues and vagabonds who generally make up the supplemental tenantry of a prison.

The Gate-house, in fact, was an epitome of the kingdom at large; a sample of the excesses and phrenzy produced by a long continuance of spiritual and political convulsion, which had broken up all the moral elements of the nation, set them in array against each other, and inflamed them to madness by the excitements of a protracted civil-war. It presented also no unapt illustration of Cromwell's government, who, throughout the whole extent of three kingdoms, kept in awe these furious factions, each inimical to the other, and all hostile to himself; holding them together in subjection with as much security and peace as his deputy Mr. Giles Lockhart preserved within the narrow limits of the Gatehouse prison.

Two of his gaol-birds (as he termed them), who stood apart from the others, were the first to notice Jocelyn, and of course excited his more particular attention. They had been actors in London, and upon the suppression of the theatres betook themselves to an itinerant life, furtively exercising their now illicit calling, as occasion offered; sometimes feasted and rewarded, sometimes whipped or imprisoned as common vagabonds, according to the caprice of local authority, or the preva

lence of political feeling. As the cavalier party, however, had little but empty plaudits to bestow, while the Puritans had the dispensation of stripes and imprisonments, they had attempted to mend their sinking fortunes, or, at least, to wreak their revenge, by the composition of a joint satire. In conformity to the existing taste for quaint alliteration it was entitled,-" Thalia's Threat and Melpomene's Menace against the Stranglers of the Stage ;" and in reward of this splenetic exertion of their muse, the authors were incontinently sent to quaff the classic air of the Gate-house. One of them whose name was Pickering, and who exhibited that air of janty slovenliness, or shabby-genteel look, which still characterizes the poorer itinerants of the profession, was buoyant, gay, and strutting in his deportment, while his semi-tragic language seemed to be an olio of all the bombastic blankverse, he had picked up in the exercise of his calling, or gleaned from the taffety phrases of Sir Euphues. His companion, whom he addressed by the name of Rookwood, appeared to be overcome by his misfortunes, and to have sunk into a squalid sloth and sottishness, comforting himself with his pipe for his inability to procure double-bub ale, and gazing silently upon its smoke with a fixed and drunk

en eye.

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"O Huntingdonian brewer base!" exclaimed the former, as he stalked up to Jocelyn with a theatrical air,—“ O truculent and most Herodian knave!

O thrice Nerotic Caligulian spawn!-or rather, as may best befit thy lineaments obscene,-O rednosed Noll! is 't not enough that men of full-grown pith, and mighty mind sublime, thy spleenful wrath endure, but must these babes and sucklings yield their blood, and feel the fury of thy festering fang? -Prithee, thou jocund bowman of the woods, youthful concomitant of Dian's train, for such thy garb and looks may well beseem, why art thou here with musty rogues forlorn, in durance vile and carceration close? Speak, that mine ear may drink intelligence."

Although Jocelyn understood very little of this rhapsodical fustian, except the familiar sobriquet applied to the Protector, he gathered enough of its general purport to reply, as he had done to the gaoler's wife, that he was imprisoned for being the son of a Royalist. "Ha! say'st thou so, my juvenilian bold, of Carolinian block the loyal chip, then are we links of the same rueful chain, concatenate in one Cromwellian doom, participants in Protectorial hate." So saying, the player held out his hand, received Jocelyn's in its palm, shook it with prodigious energy, and again putting himself in an heroic attitude, spouted to his companion-" Rookwood! once peerless on the buskined board, of voice altisonant and stately stalk, be not so tristful, saturnine, and sad. Cheer up, my Pythias! Look on the lineaments of this fair youth, for female character most apt. Will he not serve to perfect our dram pers and help us act?”