“A very good reason,” answered I, “for not becoming one at all, Master Barnaby; Odzooks! do men write your thick folios, only because they know nothing of the matter? But you have no such excuse, for you quote me a dozen authors to tell of one event; and then there’s such ‘fending and proving’ about a handful of years, that where subjects are lacking, ’fore George! you seem to me to create them.” “Well, Sir, well,” resumed the mild old man, “your wit becomes you; but as we may never meet again, I would fain pour into your bosom all the little knowledge which I possess upon this point; and so we will pass on to the Chronicles of London Bridge in the seventeenth century. “The inhuman cruelties which Queen Mary, Bishop Bonner, and others of their faith, practised upon the Protestants, may reasonably be supposed to have so embittered their minds, as to have excited in them no slight feelings of revenge, when, in their turn, they came into power. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine any other cause for the severities which they practised, or for the laws which were enacted to authorise them. The principal of these Statutes, you may remember, were five: one in the 27th of Elizabeth, 1585, chapter ii., entitled ‘_An Act against Jesuits, Seminary Priests, and other such like disobedient persons_;’ and a second passed in her 35th year, 1593, chapter ii., and called ‘_An Act for restraining Popish Recusants to some certain place of abode_.’ Under King James I., were introduced three others strengthening and confirming the former, the first of which was made in the 1st year of his reign, 1604, chapter iv., being ‘_An Act for the due execution of the Statutes against Jesuits, Seminary Priests, Recusants, &c._’: and in his third year, 1606, were passed two others, see chapters iv. and v., namely, ‘_An Act for the better discovering and repressing of Popish Recusants_;’ and ‘_An Act to prevent and avoid dangers which grow by Popish Recusants_.’ History, Master Barbican, blushes to record what cruelties were perpetrated under the sanction of those laws; and I should have omitted all notice of them, but that they are so interwoven with several anecdotes of London Bridge. My authority is a work, entitled ‘_The Catholic Book of Martyrs, or a true British Martyrology commencing with the Reformation_;’ by the Right Rev. Richard Challoner, Bishop of Debora; of which the new edition of 1825 is a singularly curious book. He states from Stow, in volume ii., page 9, that in 1578, February 3rd, John Nelson, a Priest, was executed at Tyburn, for denying the Queen’s supremacy, and that his head was erected on London Bridge; whilst, on page 74, is a similar relation of another Priest named James Fenn; but I proceed to notice a much more remarkable instance. In the year 1605, Father Henry Garnet, the Principal of the English Jesuits, was taken up and imprisoned in the Tower, for being a party concerned in the famous Gunpowder Plot: after