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powder, and gallantly swallowed it in drinking
her Majesty's health. In addition to this recital
he completed the well-known story of Edward
Osborne, apprentice to Sir William Hewet, the
cloth-worker upon London Bridge, who leaping
out of the window to save his master's drowning
daughter, finally received her in marriage, with
an immense portion; and he was already hard
upon the tale of Whittington and his fortunate
ship, the Cat, when they again found themselves
on the Baltic walk, and Isaac went to join a little
knot of civic grandees, who were huddled in
one corner of the piazza, whispering together
with an appearance of great earnestness.

No sooner had he learnt the subject of this close conference, which was the King's intention of going publicly to the celebration of mass at a Roman Catholic chapel, than his lower jaw fell with a blank look of alarm: he fixed

his

grey eye with an expression of more than ordinary suspicion upon the bearer of this appalling intelligence, and having gathered from his answers that there was undoubted warrant for the news, he said not a word more, but seiz

ing his nephew by the arm, walked hastily off, and tramped silently along the streets in the direction of Holborn. From this place his young companion was to depart in the stage coach, for the purpose of completing the last half-year of his education at Oxford. Although somewhat penurious in small matters, Goldingham was far from ungenerous in his disposition, and having dismissed the young traveller with a handsome supply of cash, he was left at full liberty, as he paced slowly back towards the city, to ruminate upon the alarming intelligence he had received. Nothing was more natural than that the King, whose religious principles had long been a matter of notoriety, should choose to go publicly to mass; but Isaac was a staunch true blue Protestant, whose general sagacity entirely deserted him when he saw, or fancied that he saw, any thing that could be magnified by his fears into a Popish plot. Every imputed conspiracy of this nature, however improbable or even impossible, received his instant credence. No perjuries were too monstrous for him to swallow; upon this subject

his taste for the marvellous and the atrocious seemed to be equally undistinguishing and insatiable. He was a firm believer in the fable of Miles Prance, the Silversmith, that forty thousand Spanish pilgrims were to invade Britain, bringing with them as many black bills to arm the Irish Catholics; he yielded a no less implicit assent to the story that the obnoxious Protestants were to be boiled alive, and that Sir Dudley North was to be skinned, stuffed, and hung up in Guildhall in terrorem ; and although the ever infamous Titus Oates was now becoming a bye-word in people's mouths for perjury, he supported the truth of his testimony to the last, retained his portrait pasted upon the walls of every room in his house, and made presents of gloves, fans, and handkerchiefs, adorned with the same hideous head, to all his female acquaintance. A steady customer to those cunning tradesmen, who, when they wanted to get rid of their unsaleable wares, tacked the attractive word Protestant to them, he found a secret consolation in wearing blue socks and garters sanctified by that appellation. Nay, upon one

occasion in the preceding reign, when the mob were rudely besetting Nell Gwyn in her coach, mistaking her for the Duchess of Portsmouth, honest Isaac beat them off with his horn-headed cane, calling out at the same time that she was the King's Protestant mistress, a distinction which immediately converted the wrath of the populace into three hearty cheers, wherein the moral and religious merchant most heartily bore a part.

In addition to these evidences of his terrors and his zeal he was occasionally heard humming to himself the Ballad of " the Raree Show," for which the unfortunate College, better known by the name of the Protestant Joiner, lost his life; -he would have staked his existence upon the veracity of the Monument, had it attributed a thousand other enormities, besides the Fire of London, to the malice of the Popish faction; he removed all the billets of wood from his cellar, lest they should be ignited by the fire-balls of the same restless incendiaries; he invariably carried in his pocket a portable jointed bludgeon armed with lead, a weapon of defence

which had received the appellation of the Protestant flail; and finally he kept in his house, and occasionally wore, a complete suit of silk armour, alleged to be of such tough texture as to be pistol and dagger proof, as a protection against a band of fellow subjects, who, although they were perfectly contemptible in point of numbers, and all quietly engaged in their respective avocations, were supposed to be not less able than willing to massacre several millions of their Protestant countrymen, in whatever manner and at whatever time they thought proper to make the attempt. That he should surrender himself to such monstrous delusions may be supposed to convey some imputation upon his sanity, or at all events upon his good judgment; but it must be remembered that he shared them with a great portion of the nation ; it was the moral plague with which the people was tormented for a lengthened period; and so deeply and widely did it spread its poison through the land, that although the virulence of the symptoms may be somewhat abated, there is too much reason to fear that the disease is far

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