In fine, there were perhaps not many towns in the kingdom, if indeed there were any at all, whose appearance underwent a greater change than this, at, and in consequence of the reformation. Had two persons, a papist and a protestant, who remembered the town in its former state, now visited and jointly surveyed it, one would have been apt to take up his lamentation and pronounce _Ichabod_! its glory is departed! while the other would be no less apt exultingly to exclaim “Babylon is fallen, is fallen!”—But a _third_ person, accustomed to view things with the eyes of a christian philosopher, would have given way to neither lamentation nor exultation, but would have considered the whole as the natural effect of a mighty revolution, and an additional proof of the changing and perishing nature of all human productions and sublunary magnificence. CHAP. II. History of Lynn for the first hundred years after the reformation; or rather, from the dissolution of the monasteries to the meeting of the long parliament and commencement of the civil wars. In the preceding account of the immediate effects of the reformation upon this town little or nothing occurs that appears of a very pleasing or favourable nature. No symptoms are discernable of either moral or intellectual improvement. The town had become protestant, but superstition and ignorance still remained, and licentiousness and barbarism seemed rather to increase than diminish. The former religious functionaries or instructors were expelled, and they were succeeded by men less competent than themselves for the tuition or instruction of the people: and therefore it was not to be expected that the latter should be better taught, or further enlightened under their guidance and management. On the contrary, we may suppose them to have gone in a retrograde rather than in a progressive direction: and so it seems really to have happened. In fact, very little appears to have been done here of reformation work, or for the advancement of protestantism during the long period now under consideration, besides the expulsion of the monks and friars and demolition of their Houses. Of that little, some account shall be given in the following section. SECTION I. _Statement of the progress of protestantism_, _or of the most remarkable and memorable acts or works of reformation which took place at Lynn during the first century after its renunciation of the papal supremacy_.