horrible that there was a special fever, known as gaol fever, which even judges and barristers often caught from the prisoners they were trying, and of which many of these guiltless men died. 22. "It was impossible," says Macaulay, "for the Dissenters to meet together without precautions such as are employed by coiners and receivers of stolen goods. The places of meeting were frequently changed. Worship was performed sometimes just before break of day; sometimes at dead of night. Round the building where the little flock was gathered sentinels were posted, to give the alarm if a stranger drew near. "The minister would have to be disguised as a carter or collier, and would come in through the back yard in a smock-frock, and with a whip in his hand.” With all these precautions, they were often caught and carried to prison. Pepys writes in his diary: "I saw several poor creatures carried by, by constables, for being at a conventicle. They go like lambs, without any resistance. I would to God they would either conform . . . or be more wise and not be catched."

1660-72.

23. John Bunyan, who lived in this reign, and was a tinker by trade, was sent to prison for preaching, and kept there twelve years. Not very many people perhaps have read The Saint's Rest,' but everybody has read the 'Pilgrim's Progress.' It was during those years of imprisonment, or having, as he said, "lighted on a certain place where was a den" (Bedford Gaol), that he laid him down and slept, and dreamed that wondrous dream.

Test and Corporation Acts.

No

24. The Dissenters were kept down in many other ways also. No one was allowed to be mayor of a town, or to hold any office in a corporation, without taking the sacrament according to the forms of the English Church. one was allowed to hold any office in the army or navy, or any government employment, without doing the same, and declaring that he did not believe in transubstantiation. These acts were called the Test and Corporation Acts. Many Dissenters did not particularly object to receive the sacrament in the Church of England now and then; so that to take office, to be made a mayor or an alderman, for instance, they would come to church once, and then all the rest of the year keep away; and in after times, when their meetings were made legal, they would regularly attend their own chapels. But the clergy thought this very dreadful, and complained that it was a great hardship to them to force them to administer the communion to men whom everybody knew to be Dissenters. Some time afterwards a law was passed forbidding a man to

attend a "conventicle," or Dissenting chapel, during the whole time he held his office. This tyrannical law, however, did not last long.

25. The Test Act was aimed especially against the Roman Catholics, whom the Tories and the Church were quite as willing to persecute as they were the Dissenters. But as both Charles and his brother James were in favour of Romanism, they were rather averse to these acts. In fact, they would have liked to fill the army with Catholics, both officers and men, and so to have oppressed the Church of England in its turn. Charles, however, was more prudent than his brother, and it was not till James's reign that this matter became really formidable.

26. Two dreadful misfortunes befell the city of London during the reign of Charles II. The first was the Great Plague, which broke out in a more terrible way than had The Plague. been known for hundreds of years; since the time indeed of the Black Death. The plague was a more frightful disease than any that come upon us now; and the doctors did not know how to treat it. The misery and terror of that awful time can hardly be imagined without reading the letters or diaries of the people who were in the midst of it. Though this was the most terrible visitation of all, the plague had often been in the country before, and the parish registers, written very drily, give some most affecting narratives. In one we read of the deaths of a whole family-father, children, brothers, servants. When they were nearly all dead, and there only remained an uncle and his nephew, and a servant-girl, “the uncle being sick of the plague, and perceiving that he must die, and knowing that his nephew and the girl would not be able to bury him" (the neighbours would be afraid to do so, no doubt), "arose out of his bed, made his own grave, caused his nephew to put some straw into it, and went and laid him down in the said grave, and so departed out of this world." A few days after the nephew died, and lastly the servant-girl; and so the whole family passed

away.

1665.

27. When the plague came into a house they used to mark a red cross on the door, and write up, "Lord have mercy upon us." Pepys says the first time he saw this, "much against his will," was on a very hot day in June, when he saw it on two or three houses in Drury Lane. Soon there were hundreds of houses with that sad mark on them. He tells us how the bells were always tolling; people were afraid to look each other in the face; the discourse in the street was of death,

and nothing else. Nearly all the rich people fled away; a great many of the clergy among them. The shops were shut up, and the whole city desolate. One clergyman who stayed in the midst of it wrote, "What eye would not weep to see so many habitations uninhabited? the poor sick not visited, the hungry not fed, the grave not satisfied. Death stares us continually in the face; . . . the coffins are daily and hourly carried along the streets. The bells never cease to put us in mind of our mortality. The custom was in the beginning to bury the dead in the night only; now both night and day will hardly be time enough to do it." After six months the plague seemed to have spent itself, but more than 100,000 people had perished in that time.

1666. The Fire.

28. The next year, long before the citizens had had time to recover their courage and spirits, the other awful calamity of the Great Fire came upon them. The greater part of the houses in the city were still built of wood, and were many of them very old, so that if it once caught fire it was extremely difficult to put out. The fire broke out, they say, accidentally at the king's baker's, in Pudding Lane, and soon spread all round. Pepys, who is generally the most prosaic and matter-of-fact of men, was hurried into a sort of poetry by the excitement. "As it grew darker,” he says, "the

an

fire appeared more and more, and in corners and upon steeples, and between churches and houses, as far as we could see up the hill of the city, in a most horrid, malicious, bloody flame, not like the fine flame of an ordinary fire. . . . We stayed till, it being darkish, we saw the fire as only one entire arch of fire arch of above a mile long: it made me weep to see it." Evelyn describes it no less vividly. "God grant mine eyes may never behold the like, who now saw above 10,000 houses all in one flame; the noise and cracking and thunder of the impetuous flames, the shrieking of women and children, the hurry of people, the fall of towers, houses, and churches, was like an hideous storm, and the air all about so hot and inflamed that at the last one was not able to approach it."

29. The streets were full of carts, and the river of barges, in which people were trying to save their things. At last it was found that the only way to stop the fire, which continued burning for three days, was to blow up many houses with gunpowder, so as to make gaps, beyond which the flames could not spread. The whole city from the Tower to the Temple was destroyed. St. Paul's Cathedral and innumerable churches were in ashes; and this is the reason why there are so few really old Gothic churches

mous.

remaining in London. No doubt the old city, with its Gothic cathedral, and its quaint timbered houses, was far more beautiful and interesting than the gaunt London of to-day. Very few lives were lost in this fire, but the property destroyed was enor"The poor inhabitants were dispersed about St. George's Fields and Moorfields as far as Highgate. Some under tents, some under miserable huts and hovels, many without a rag or any necessary utensils, bed or board, who from delicateness, riches, and easy accommodations, in stately and well-furnished houses, were now reduced to extremest misery and poverty." The booksellers, who lived, as so many do now, in Paternoster Row, lost £150,000 in books.

30. But if all this property was burned, it seems that the plague was burnt out too. The picturesque old wooden houses, with small windows that would not open, were very dirty; the infection would never have been got out of them; and after the great fire had destroyed them all, the plague gradually but entirely disappeared.

LECTURE L.-THE LAST STUART KINGS.

Charles and the King of France. Progress of learning. Death of Charles. James II. Rebellion of Monmouth. The "Bloody Assizes." The king favours Romanism, and breaks the laws. The seven bishops. Birth of a prince. William of Orange. The flight of James.

1. In their dismay and excitement after the Great Fire, the people could not believe that it arose by accident; they soon made up their minds that it was the work of the Papists. Numbers of innocent Roman Catholics were thrown into prison, and though no proofs could ever be found, and no one now imagines that they had anything to do with it, it was publicly engraved on the tall monument which was built in remembrance of the calamity, that "the dreadful burning of this ancient city was begun and carried on by the treachery and malice of the Popish faction." This inscription was not destroyed till a few years ago.

1678.

Plot.

2. Similar suspicions went on for many years longer. The intrigues and conspiracies of the Catholics in the days of Elizabeth, the still more terrible Gunpowder Treason, had left an impression on the minds of the people The Popish which was very slow to wear itself out. A few years later the whole country was agitated by the report of a "Popish Plot," the object of which was said to be to assassinate the king and massacre all the Protestants. Everybody was only too ready to believe it; witnesses came forward to divulge the particulars, and to declare the names of those concerned. The principal witness was one Titus Oates, a man who, besides having a most infamous private character, was especially noted for his frequent changes of religion. Burnet, a bishop who wrote the history of this time, and who saw and conversed with most of the principal people then living, both bad and good, says that Oates was the son of an Anabaptist, that he conversed much with Socinians, became a clergyman of the Church of England, and afterwards attached himself to the