militia, they would soon be no better than slaves to the lords, and the victims of a most cruel oppression. The ignorance and credulity of the vulgar were by these arts widely and successfully imposed upon; but the population of Cheddar was preserved from these corrupting falsehoods by the prudence of Noble. He early obtained a copy of the commission of array, which was written in Latin, and having translated it with fidelity, distributed copies from house to house. The word of the good parson was ever held in reverence by his flock, therefore, with few exceptions, and those confined to the worst characters in the village, his account of the matter was received as true; while in many other places the crafty supporters of the levelling party, taking advantage of the commissions being in Latin, translated it into what English they pleased, and abused simple folk in the manner related. While the Marquis of Hertford maintained himself at Wells all things continued quiet at Cheddar; but as Noble had foreseen, there was soon a very powerful party brought against him, and he was compelled to retire, before the increasing forces and the active officers of the Parliament, to Sherborne, in Dorsetshire. Master Daws, the artful and the covetous enemy of Noble, who had been already baffled in his endeavour to drag him before a committee, and whose eyes were steadily fixed upon the living of Cheddar, had not been inactive while the Royalists lay at Wells. He had, it is true, seldom ventured from home for fear his precious carcass might receive some weighty mark of the wrath or merriment of a royal trooper, though he might have gone to and fro in his clerical garb as safe as an innocent child: but conscience made a coward of him; for he had employed the period of his confinement to his house in preparing certain lying and inflammatory papers, which, through the agency of a near relation, who was a scrivener’s clerk at Bristol, he procured to be secretly printed in that city. These papers were of the most indecent and outrageous nature, directed chiefly against prelacy, and all supporters of the church of England and the episcopal form of government. Now, this scrivener’s clerk, though he knew and despised the hypocrisy of Master Daws, and laughed at all religion, whether real or pretended, lent himself as a most ready agent in this charitable work. “There are diversities of gifts, my dear Matty,” said his crafty uncle Daws in the letter which accompanied his manuscript libels,--“diversities of gifts, but the same spirit:--thou hast a lively wit, and a playful hand with thy pencil; prithee put a little device of some facetious kind at the head of each of these papers,--such an one as may be easily struck off in a wood-cut of the kind, which the profane Italians call caricature: but what need I say more? Thou knowest what I would have:--see thou do it. I wish to have them done before Cheddar fair, which is held, thou knowest, at the latter end of September.