The joy of the English people at the restoration of the monarchy, which seemed at first to be as universal as it was enthusiastic, was of short duration. The Stuarts were the Bourbons of England, incapable of being taught by adversity. Within two years Charles II. alarmed Protestant England by marrying a Portuguese princess. The great plague of 1665, that destroyed in London alone sixty-eight thousand persons, was followed in the very next year by the great fire of London, which consumed thirteen thousand two hundred houses. At a moment when the public mind was reduced to the most abject credulity by such events as these, the scoundrel Titus Oates appeared, declaring that the dread calamities which had afflicted England, and others then imminent, were only parts of an awful _Popish Plot_, which aimed at the destruction of the king and the restoration of the Catholic religion. A short time after, 1678, Sir Edmundsbury Godfrey, the magistrate before whom Titus Oates made his deposition, was found dead in a field near London, the victim probably of some fanatic assassin of the Catholic party. The kingdom was thrown into an ecstasy of terror, from which, as before observed, it has not to this day wholly recovered. Terror may lurk in the blood of a race ages after the removal of its cause, as we find our sensitive horses shying from low-lying objects at the road-side, though a thousand generations may have peacefully labored and died since their ancestors crouched from the spring of a veritable wild beast. The broadsheets of that year, 1678, and of the troublous years following, even until William of Orange was seated on the throne of England, in 1690, have, we may almost say, but one topic--the Popish Plot. The spirit of that period lives in those sheets.