were themselves partisans of the popular party. The Parliament found Dunster, thus preserved, a place useful enough; for here during twelve months, from June 1650, was imprisoned that dauntless reformer and pamphleteer of those troubled times, William Prynne, who proved himself a scourge to foes and friends. He began, absurdly enough, as it seems to us in these days, by attacking “love-locks” and long hair worn by men, and short hair affected by women, with an excursus upon chin-wags and lip-whiskers; and proceeding by easy stages to a denunciation of stage-plays, religious controversy, and political bludgeoning. He was, in short, a born controversialist: the Universal Provider, so to say, of red-hot pamphlets, and generally left his opponents dead, figuratively speaking. A very grim person was William Prynne. No one, it is quite safe to say, ever called him “Willie,” and as for “Bill,” that would have been an impossible familiarity with the stern-faced Puritan, even supposing that vulgar diminutive to have at that time been invented. By the way, have the vulgarian who originated “Bill,” and the period of its origination, ever been traced? His opponents were not skilled in wordy warfare, but what they lacked in repartee and argument they fully made up for with the pillory, the whip, and the branding-irons, and they inflicted some particularly cutting rejoinders when they caused his ears to be shorn off. Thus deprived of his face-flaps, many a man would have rested from his pamphleteering, but Prynne persisted, and earned thereby the particular attention of Laud, the High Church Archbishop of Canterbury, who procured his branding on the cheeks with the letters, “S. L.” for “seditious libeller.” With that iron humour that was all his own, Prynne referred to this horrible facial disfigurement as “Stigmata Laudis.” The loss of his aural attachments, together with the addition of this undecorative poker-work, and a fine of £5,000, so embittered Prynne that he for ever after pursued Laud with an undying hatred, and had a prominent hand in hounding the Archbishop to public trial and execution, in those days when his fellow-Puritans had obtained the upper hand. Can we honestly blame that intense malevolence he directed at the insidious Romaniser, who would have imprisoned men’s consciences again, and who did not hesitate, in procuring these savage mutilations of his opponents, thus to disfigure the image of God! The fearless Prynne, imprisoned here awhile, passed the time of his captivity in looking over and arranging the Luttrell family papers. He was himself a Somerset man, and his detention in this castle could not have been very unpleasant, for it was then as much residence as fortress.