ich his own
subsequent misfortunes afforded. The eventful scenes which Europe has
exhibited these last twenty years have awefully multiplied such
warnings: May they act on the minds of Englishmen, and on those of their
rulers, till the last great day of general audit which shall terminate
the existence of this island with that of the earth!

The same good intentions and mistaken methods that distinguished the
administration of the Sovereign, marked Mrs. Mellicent's superintendance
of Ribblesdale. She was a politician of the school of Elizabeth, very
willing to do good to her inferiors, but positively requiring that they
should obey her. Prescription and authority, docility and respect, old
principles and old manners, were her favourite topics; and in preaching
submission to all superiors from the King to the village constable,
precedence and decorum were her constant texts. Her notions were perhaps
urged too far, but this was an age of extremes; the minds of the people
were kept in a continual ferment, every object was distorted, and the
calamities which ensued, in many instances, proceeded more from
ill-directed zeal than positive malice; from fanaticism rather than
hypocrisy. At least a bewildered imagination seems at first to have
actuated the majority of the most eminent commonwealth's men to support
what they deemed a righteous cause, though in their subsequent actions
party-spirit urged them to do what they knew to be sinful, and to
attempt to gloss it with those false colourings which make us now justly
combine the names of hypocrite and fanatic, and hold them up as a
reproach to the age in which they passed for saint and patriot.

The new lights, as they were termed, had begun to set England in a
blaze, and two of their burning torches were greeted in Ribblesdale in
the persons of Morgan and Davies, the latter the village-schoolmaster,
the former a low-minded money-scrivener, who had amassed a large fortune
in "the godly city of Gloucester"; and retired to spend it in his native
town, where he purchased an estate, acted as justice of the peace, and
styled himself gentleman. Both were illuminated apostles of the new
doctrines, but each had a peculiar department in the work of
reformation; one wishing to batter down the spiritual abominations of
the church, while the other confined his zeal to destroying the bands of
tyrannical rulers, and "calling Israel to their tents." Davies laboured
under the pressure of pov