him into pecuniary difficulties, was fined by the Court of Star Chamber in the vast sum of £30,000, and dismissed from all his employments. The clemency of James mitigated this enormous fine, but the influence of the Earl of Suffolk was gone; and in 1621 the Shrewsbury Drapers made an order upon the books of their Company, ‘That they will not buy cloth at Oswestry, or elsewhere than in Salop.’” As we have shewn in a preceding page, the struggles of the Welsh, to recover the freedom they had lost, terminated with the death of their last great leader, Owain Glyndwr. “Their wild spirit of independence, and their enthusiasm for liberty,” says the eloquent historian whom we have already quoted, “from this period gradually declined. The blood of their beloved Princes was nearly extinct; and their native bravery was subdued, or rendered ineffectual, by their intestine divisions and by their repeated misfortunes. When fierce valour and unregulated freedom are opposed to discipline, to enlarged views, and to sound policy, the contest is very unequal: it is not therefore surprising that the genius of England at length obtained the ascendancy. It was, indeed, an interesting spectacle, and might justly have excited indignation and pity, to have seen an ancient and gallant nation, falling the victims of private ambition, or sinking under the weight of a superior power. But such emotions, which were then due to that injured people, have lost at this period their force and their poignancy. A new train of ideas arises; when we see that the change is beneficial to the vanquished—when we see a wild and precarious liberty succeeded by a freedom which is secured by equal and fixed laws—when we see manners hostile and barbarous, and a spirit of rapine and cruelty, softened down into the arts of peace, and the milder arts of civilized life—when we see this Remnant of the Ancient Britons uniting in interests, and mingling in friendship with their conquerors, and enjoying with them the same constitutional liberties; the purity of which, we trust, will continue uncorrupted as long as the British Empire shall be numbered among the nations of the earth.” We now approach a period in our national history which has ever been viewed, by opposing political parties, in a conflicting spirit. The turbulent elements of THE CIVIL WARS were not allayed until Death had silenced the two great actors in the tragic and murderous drama. The present volume, devoted principally to local history, is not an appropriate organ in which to discuss the merits and demerits of Charles I. and his sturdy rival Cromwell. Charles was doubtless guilty of many gross violations of his prerogative, and plunged into a reckless course of misgovernment, accompanied with galling taxation, which the people, beginning to learn the lessons of liberty, and to understand the genius of the British constitution, would not tamely submit to.