These resolutions were put to desperate trial that very night. Just next
to Stanton’s apartment were lodged two most uncongenial neighbours. One
of them was a puritanical weaver, who had been driven mad by a single
sermon from the celebrated Hugh Peters, and was sent to the mad-house as
full of election and reprobation as he could hold,--and fuller. He
regularly repeated over the _five points_ while day-light lasted, and
imagined himself preaching in a conventicle with distinguished success;
towards twilight his visions were more gloomy, and at midnight his
blasphemies became horrible. In the opposite cell was lodged a loyalist
tailor, who had been ruined by giving credit to the cavaliers and their
ladies,--(for at this time, and much later, down to the reign of Anne,
tailors were employed by females even _to make_ and _fit on their
stays_),--who had run mad with drink and loyalty on the burning of the
Rump, and ever since had made the cells of the mad-house echo with
fragments of the ill-fated Colonel Lovelace’s songs, scraps from
Cowley’s “Cutter of Coleman street,” and some curious specimens from Mrs
Aphra Behn’s plays, where the cavaliers are denominated the _heroicks_,
and Lady Lambert and Lady Desborough represented as going to meeting,
their large Bibles carried before them by their pages, and falling in
love with two banished cavaliers by the way.--“Tabitha, Tabitha,” cried
a voice half in exultation and half in derision; “thou shalt go with thy
hair curled, and thy breasts naked;”--and then added in an affected
voice,--“I could dance the Canaries once, spouse.” This never failed to
rouse the feelings, or rather operate on the instincts of the puritanic
weaver, who immediately answered, “Colonel Harrison shall come out of
the west, riding on a sky-coloured mule, which signifies
instruction(10).” “Ye lie, ye round-head son of a b----h,” roared the
cavalier tailor, “Colonel Harrison will be damned before he ever mounts
a sky-coloured mule;” and he concluded this pithy sentence with
fragments of anti-Oliverian songs.
“And may I live to see
Old Noll upon a tree,
And many such as he;
Confound him, confound him,
Diseases all around him.”
(10) Vide Cutter of Coleman street.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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