This political artifice of appropriating cant terms, or odious nicknames, could not fail to flourish among a people so perpetually divided by contending interests as ourselves; every party with us have had their watchword, which has served either to congregate themselves, or to set on the ban-dogs of one faction to worry and tear those of another. We practised it early, and we find it still prospering! The _Puritan_ of Elizabeth's reign survives to this hour; the trying difficulties which that wise sovereign had to overcome in settling the national religion, found no sympathy in either of the great divisions of her people; she retained as much of the catholic rites as might be decorous in the new religion, and sought to unite, and not to separate, her children. John Knox, in the spirit of charity, declared, that "she was neither gude protestant, nor yet resolute papist; let the world judge quilk is the third." A jealous party arose, who were for reforming the reformation. In their attempt at more than human purity, they obtained the nickname of _Puritans_; and from their fastidiousness about very small matters, _Precisians_; these Drayton characterises as persons that for a painted glass window would pull down the whole church. At that early period these nicknames were soon used in an odious sense; for Warner, a poet in the reign of Elizabeth, says,-- If hypocrites why _puritaines_ we term be asked, in breese, 'Tis but an _ironised terme_; good-fellow so spels theese! Honest Fuller, who knew that many good men were among these _Puritans_, wished to decline the term altogether, under the less offensive one of _Non-conformists_. But the fierce and the fiery of this party, in Charles the First's time had been too obtrusive not to fully merit the ironical appellative; and the peaceful expedient of our moderator dropped away with the page in which it was written. The people have frequently expressed their own notions of different parliaments by some apt nickname. In Richard the Second's time, to express their dislike of the extraordinary and irregular proceedings of the lords against the sovereign, as well as their sanguinary measures, they called it "The _wonder-working_ and the _unmerciful_ parliament." In Edward the Third's reign, when the Black Prince was yet living, the parliament, for having pursued with severity the party of the Duke of Lancaster, was so popular, that the people distinguished it as the _good_ parliament. In Henry the Third's time, the parliament opposing the king, was called "_Parliamentum insanum_," the mad parliament, because the lords came armed to insist on the confirmation of the great charter. A Scottish parliament, from its perpetual shiftings from place to place was ludicrously nicknamed the _running_ parliament; in the same spirit we had our _long_ parliament. The nickname of _Pensioner_ parliament stuck to the House of Commons which sate nearly eighteen years without