It is difficult for us--now that the reformation has become a remote event, and Protestantism holds undisputed supremacy; now that the principles of liberty are well understood, and the asperities and virulence of old controversies, except in a few cases, have, been softened down--to enter into the anti-papal feelings which moved our stout-hearted fathers more than two centuries ago. At that period, the Reformation, under Elizabeth, had lasted little more than eighty years. The parents of some who were now living had witnessed the cruelties of the Marian persecution; the men and women under Charles the First, had, as boys and girls, in ingle-nook at Christmas-tide, felt their blood run cold whilst listening to stories of the Smithfield fires from eye-witnesses. A few, then in London, had actually beheld with their own eyes a scene which stirs our hearts when only represented by the pencil--Elizabeth haranguing her troops at Tilbury Fort. More had heard, with their own ears, the current contemporary talk about the Spanish Armada, as it sailed up the channel, and had caught the first tidings of the proud armament being scattered to the winds--just after the subsiding of the storm which sunk the accursed ships--and they could never forget how the nation drew breath after a gasp of most awful suspense in 1588. These last events were about as near to the times we are describing, as the Battle of Waterloo is to our own. The gunpowder plot was an incident of no very distant occurrence; only as far back in the memory of members of the Long Parliament, as the Bristol riots, and the Swing rick burning in our own. Numbers of the gentlemen in high-crowned hats and short cloaks, who walked into the House of Commons in 1641, filled with alarm respecting Popery, had participated in the sensation produced by that discovery, which is celebrated now only by a few boys on the 5th of November. Besides all this, the sufferings of French Huguenots were fresh in everybody's mind. Refugees who had escaped the galleys were still in London. The massacre at Paris, commemorated by the Pope's medal, hardly fell beyond the recollections of existing persons, whilst new religious conflicts in France, and the siege of Rochelle, had occurred but a few years before. The thirty years' war in Germany was not concluded; and the battle of Prague, the execution of the Protestant patriots in front of the Rathhaus, the expulsion of the disciples of Huss, and the barbarities of the Papists throughout Bohemia, were in everyone's memory. [Sidenote: 1641, October.]