cursed extravagances; that the City beauties were not inferior
to those at the other end of the town,... after which, to outdo their
murmurings, he said, that he wondered Whitehall was not yet consumed by
fire from heaven, since such rakes as Rochester, Killigrew, and Sidney
were suffered there.'

This conduct endeared him so much to the City, and made him so welcome
at their clubs, that at last he grew sick of their cramming, and endless
invitations.

He now tried a new sphere of action; and instead of returning, as he
might have done, to the court, retreated into the most obscure corners
of the metropolis; and again changing his name and dress, gave himself
out as a German doctor named Bendo, who professed to find out
inscrutable secrets, and to apply infallible remedies; to know, by
astrology, all the past, and to foretell the future.

If the reign of Charles was justly deemed an age of high civilization,
it was also one of extreme credulity. Unbelief in religion went hand in
hand with blind faith in astrology and witchcraft; in omens,
divinations, and prophecies: neither let us too strongly despise, in
these their foibles, our ancestors. They had many excuses for their
superstitions; and for their fears, false as their hopes, and equally
groundless. The circulation of knowledge was limited: the public
journals, that part of the press to which we now owe inexpressible
gratitude for its general accuracy, its enlarged views, its purity, its
information, was then a meagre statement of dry facts: an announcement,
not a commentary. 'The Flying Post,' the 'Daily Courant,' the names of
which may be supposed to imply speed, never reached lone country places
till weeks after they had been printed on their one duodecimo sheet of
thin coarse paper. Religion, too, just emerging into glorious light from
the darkness of popery, had still her superstitions; and the mantle that
priestcraft had contrived to throw over her exquisite, radiant, and
simple form, was not then wholly and finally withdrawn. Romanism still
hovered in the form of credulity.

But now, with shame be it spoken, in the full noonday genial splendour
of our Reformed Church, with newspapers, the leading articles of which
rise to a level with our greatest didactic writers, and are competent
even to form the mind as well as to amuse the leisure hours of the young
readers: with every species of direct communication, we yet hold to
fallacies from which the credulous