Paddington, however, is no longer what it was; the lay element, independent of all craft, has thoroughly diffused itself through the country; and its advent in this place, though attended with much cunning, was the real cause of the wonderful transformation which has taken place here within the last half-century. The Reformation and the Revolution added to the numbers and importance of the people; and the execrable act of that vain braggart, who wildly called himself the State, not only increased the population of Paddington, but brought out to useful purpose the christian virtues of the residents of this village. Here, on the revocation of the edict of Nantes, many of the exiled protestants of France found a home, which had been denied them by their _great_ King; and here, too, the memory of their sufferings and virtues will be kept green, so long as one of their graves shall be permitted to remain in the Old Church-yard. It is impossible to tell what number of persons lived in this parish, at any one period previous to the present century. The oldest Parish Register, now to be found in Paddington, is dated 1701; and all the written proceedings of the rate-payers in vestry assembled, previous to the second of April, 1793, are said to have been burnt, lost, stolen or destroyed. The only sources from which I have been able to form any conjecture respecting the ancient population of Paddington, are, therefore, necessarily very imperfect, and open to many objections. By the Subsidy Rolls, however, we discover the names of those who were rated in particular places, at different periods, when the respective subsidies were levied; and although their tombstones may have crumbled into dust, or may have been removed by Act of Parliament, and sold “for the best price that could be got,” yet in these tax-papers their names may receive a notice which will, for centuries, preserve their memories. From the Subsidy Roll of the sixteenth year of Henry the eighth, I find that twenty persons, then living in Paddington, were taxed for the subsidy levied that year, although the amount of tax collected in this parish was but forty-eight shillings. All the heads of families might not have been included in this levy; but, if we suppose that all were included, and that each of these twenty persons represented a family, and if we calculate further five individuals for each family, we shall make the population of Paddington, in 1524, one hundred; which in all probability, was not very much under, or over, the number at that date.