Two of the courtezans of Charles II.'s time were Lucy Locket and Kitty Fisher. The following rhyme suggests that Kitty Fisher supplanted Lucy Locket in Charles' fickle esteem-- "Lucy Locket lost her pocket, Kitty Fisher found it; Nothing in it, nothing in it, But the binding round it." On his death-bed the monarch commended the Duchesses of Cleveland and Portsmouth to his successor, and said to James, "Do not let poor Nelly (Nell Gwynne) starve!" Even their pockets were as badly lined as Lucy Locket's. The hatred of the Roman Catholic religion "had become," said Macaulay, "one of the ruling passions of the community, and was as strong in the ignorant and profane as in those who were Protestants from conviction." Charles II. was suspected by many of leaning towards the Roman Catholic religion. His brother, and heir presumptive, was discovered to be a bigoted Catholic, and in defiance to the remonstrances of the House of Commons had married another papist--Mary of Modena. The common people apprehended a return of the times of her whom they unreasonably called Bloody Mary. Sons of this marriage, they feared, meant a long succession of princes and kings hostile to the Protestant faith and government by the people. In 1689, when William of Orange became king in James II.'s place, a political squib went off in the style of a nursery lullaby, entitled "Father Peter's policy discovered; or, the Prince of Wales proved a Popish Perkin"-- "In Rome there is a fearful rout, And what do you think it's all about? Because the birth of the Babe's come out! Sing, Lalla by babee, by, by, by." The Douce MS. contains-- "See-saw, sack a day, Monmouth is a pretie boy, Richmond is another; Grafton is my onely joy, and why should I these three destroy To please a pious brother?" At the beginning of this present century the renowned Pastorini contributed his share to simple rhyming. A writer in the _Morning Chronicle_ of that period points out Pastorini as being no less a personage than the Right Rev. Charles Walmesley, D.D., a Roman Catholic prelate, whose false prophecies under the name of Pastorini were intended to bring about the events they pretended to foretell--the destruction of the Irish Protestants in 1825. Just previous to this year every bush and bramble in Ireland had this remarkable couplet affixed to it-- "In the year eighteen hundred and twenty-five There shall not be a Protestant left alive." In 1835, when the efforts of the Whig Ministry to despoil the Irish Church proved so strong, a writer in the Press caricatured Lord Grey, Lyttleton, Dan O'Connell, and Lord Brougham in the following nursery rhymes. The attempt was ingenious, but only of small value as showing the rhymes to be the popular ones of that day. "There was an old woman, as I've heard tell, She went to the market her eggs to sell." And--