persevering
activity placed all her resources in the hands of a man who, scarcely
ranked by birth in the patrician order, could make every European
sovereign tremble on his throne. Yet still, like the mystical sun in the
Apocalypse, tormenting others while he was himself tormented, the era of
his assuming power was the consummation of his extreme misery. He waded
through seas of blood; he broke every divine and human obligation; he
made the name of liberty a terror, and that of religion contemptible, to
become himself a more pitiable object than the veriest wretches whom he
inhumed in his prisons. They had some who sympathized in their
sufferings, some who wished them God speed; but though the civilized
world trembled at the name of Cromwell, he knew he had spies, creatures,
and parasites, but not one friend.

Yet amidst this secret wretchedness and universal odium, the distant
reflex of his name and authority was respected by all. Lady Bellingham
found her reception very different, as the Protector's friend, in her
return through England, than when she fled to Scotland an alarmed
fugitive. Conscious of former remissness, Morgan met her at Lancaster,
and earnestly entreated she would repose some days at Saint's-Rest after
the fatigue of her journey. The alarm and mortification she had endured
in that neighbourhood made her recollect the village with disgust; but
there were some mysteries which she wished him to explain. Nursery tales
affirm, that Puss, when converted into a fine lady, retained her old
propensity of catching mice; and though Lady Bellingham was transformed
from a fine lady into a devotee, the renovating spirit of true religion
had not altered her temper or inclinations; there was the same
waywardness in the former, the same cold selfishness in the latter.
While she raved at formal and legal Christians, she was herself the true
formalist, presuming on superior merit from the length of her devotional
exercises, her rigid austerities, and the sums she expended in spreading
her peculiar notions. But she came out of her closet to make her inmates
and dependants wretched; her fasting-days were unsanctified through
moroseness, and beside that, her gifts were too much confined to
party-purposes to be entitled to the praise of charity; ostentation blew
the trumpet before her alms, and she had the reward she sought, in the
praise of men.

To return from the description to the illustration of this not uncommon
c