in their invectives; prophesying daily in the streets to crowds, launching invectives against the ministers of the established church, and predicting heavy judgments on the British metropolis and nation. It was at last thought necessary to put a stop to their career, and they were consequently prosecuted as impostors. They were sentenced to be exposed on a scaffold, at Charing Cross and the Royal Exchange, with a paper declaring their offence; to pay each of them a fine of twenty marks; and to find security for their good behaviour. After a time the sect which they had formed died away, but its ruin was less to be attributed to the punishment of the prophets, or the recovery of reason by their votaries, than by a report which was spread that they were nothing more than the instruments of designing men, who wished to disseminate Socinianism, and destroy orthodoxy. About twenty years after the freaks of the French prophets had been put down in England, scenes occurred in the French capital which degrade human nature, and appear almost incredible. Those scenes arose out of the contest between the Jansenists and their antagonists, and the dispute respecting the celebrated Bull Unigenitus, which the Jansenists held in abhorrence. One of the oppugners of the bull was the deacon Paris, a pious and charitable man, whose scruples on the subject prevented him from taking priest’s orders, and who relinquished his patrimony to his younger brother, and lived by making stockings, the gains arising from which humble occupation he shared with the poor. His benevolence, his piety, and his austere life, gained for him admiration and affection; and when he died, in 1727, his grave in the churchyard of St. Medard was visited by crowds, as that of a saint. Some of his votaries, who were diseased or infirm, soon began to imagine that a miracle was worked on them by the influence of the blessed deceased. Blind eyes were said to be restored to their faculty of seeing, and contracted limbs to be elongated. As faith increased, cures increased, and so did the multitudes which thronged from all parts, and consisted of the highest as well as the lowest ranks. The votaries now began to exhibit the most violent convulsionary movements, and to utter groans, shrieks, and cries. As such movements are readily propagated by sympathy, the number of persons affected grew daily greater. At length, the matter beginning to wear a serious aspect, the government shut up the churchyard; a proceeding which gave birth to a witty but somewhat profane distich, which was written upon the gate: “De par le Roi, defense à Dieu De faire miracle en ce lieu.”