The same good intentions and mistaken methods that distinguished the administration of the Sovereign, marked Mrs. Mellicent's superintendance of Ribblesdale. She was a politician of the school of Elizabeth, very willing to do good to her inferiors, but positively requiring that they should obey her. Prescription and authority, docility and respect, old principles and old manners, were her favourite topics; and in preaching submission to all superiors from the King to the village constable, precedence and decorum were her constant texts. Her notions were perhaps urged too far, but this was an age of extremes; the minds of the people were kept in a continual ferment, every object was distorted, and the calamities which ensued, in many instances, proceeded more from ill-directed zeal than positive malice; from fanaticism rather than hypocrisy. At least a bewildered imagination seems at first to have actuated the majority of the most eminent commonwealth's men to support what they deemed a righteous cause, though in their subsequent actions party-spirit urged them to do what they knew to be sinful, and to attempt to gloss it with those false colourings which make us now justly combine the names of hypocrite and fanatic, and hold them up as a reproach to the age in which they passed for saint and patriot. The new lights, as they were termed, had begun to set England in a blaze, and two of their burning torches were greeted in Ribblesdale in the persons of Morgan and Davies, the latter the village-schoolmaster, the former a low-minded money-scrivener, who had amassed a large fortune in "the godly city of Gloucester"; and retired to spend it in his native town, where he purchased an estate, acted as justice of the peace, and styled himself gentleman. Both were illuminated apostles of the new doctrines, but each had a peculiar department in the work of reformation; one wishing to batter down the spiritual abominations of the church, while the other confined his zeal to destroying the bands of tyrannical rulers, and "calling Israel to their tents." Davies laboured under the pressure of poverty. He had displeased Dr. Beaumont by his seditious and impertinent behaviour, and the inhabitants withdrew their children from his school; but as his means of living decreased, his opinion of his own deserts enlarged; he mistook the cravings of want for spiritual illumination, and so perplexed his mind by reading the scurrilous libels of the day, as to be firmly persuaded that the King was the Devil's bairn, and Archbishop Laud the personal antichrist. A description of church ceremonies thrilled him with horror, and in every prosecution of a contumacious minister his ardent fancy saw a revival of the flames of Smithfield, while his confused notions of right and justice convinced him, that if the arm of the spirit failed, that of the flesh must be exerted, to throw down these strong holds. He had long believed himself equal to Dr.