The number of wretched beings condemned and executed for this imaginary crime at the Assizes of Suffolk and Essex alone, in the year 1646, amounted to two hundred. Dr Zachary Gray affirms that he had seen an authentic account of persons who had so suffered in the whole of England, amounting to from three to four thousand. So late as the year 1697 seven persons, three men and four women, were burnt at Paisley for this alleged crime. We seldom sufficiently consider how near we are to those times of dreadful superstition and cruelty! How short a period it is since the light of a brighter day dawned upon us! But in the midst of these terrible disorders, changes which had been in silent operation during several centuries began to produce visible results. The independent power of the nobles had been suppressed; the feuds that raged between them, filling the country with disorder and bloodshed, had been put down; the supremacy of the law had been established; property and life had become more secure; industry had taken a surprising start; the practical abolition of serfdom had been to a large extent effected; and at last came the final breaking up of the feudal system in the reign of Henry VII. by the passing of the law authorizing the alienation of land. About the middle of the fifteenth century improvements in the condition of the people, which had been gradually effected by these changes, were accelerated by a succession of events that gave an extraordinary impulse to the human mind, just aroused from the long and deep sleep of the middle ages—that dark night which was now passing away. Among the most memorable of these was the invention of printing, which the three immortal masters of the art had now completed (1436–1442), giving untiring and undying wings to thought;— The diffusion over the West of Europe of the remains of a former civilization, by the dispersion of the treasures of classical art, literature, and science, which before Constantinople fell into the hands of barbarians (1453) had been confined within the walls of that city;— The cessation of the long and disastrous struggle between the East and the West, by the expulsion of the Moors from Spain (1492);— The discovery of the New World;— And lastly, the Reformation, that stupendous work which with giant strength burst asunder the chain which consummate skill and supreme power had spent ages in forging and riveting: that stupendous work, which was not merely emancipation from spiritual bondage, but the re-communication of the long-lost spirit of religion; the noble men who achieved it being ever, even in their day of triumph, less intent on demolishing the gorgeous edifice that had held the mind enthralled, than on erecting a pure temple in which it might worship with sincerity and freedom.