at this conjuncture: and never had
concord been more needed. Legitimate authority there was none. All those
evil passions which it is the office of government to restrain, and
which the best governments restrain but imperfectly, were on a sudden
emancipated from control; avarice, licentiousness, revenge, the hatred
of sect to sect, the hatred of nation to nation. On such occasions it
will ever be found that the human vermin which, neglected by ministers
of state and ministers of religion, barbarous in the midst of
civilisation, heathen in the midst of Christianity, burrows among all
physical and all moral pollution, in the cellars and garrets of great
cities, will at once rise into a terrible importance. So it was now in
London. When the night, the longest night, as it chanced, of the year,
approached, forth came from every den of vice, from the bear garden at
Hockley, and from the labyrinth of tippling houses and brothels in
the Friars, thousands of housebreakers and highwaymen, cutpurses and
ringdroppers. With these were mingled thousands of idle apprentices, who
wished merely for the excitement of a riot. Even men of peaceable and
honest habits were impelled by religious animosity to join the lawless
part of the population. For the cry of No Popery, a cry which has more
than once endangered the existence of London, was the signal for outrage
and rapine. First the rabble fell on the Roman Catholic places of
worship. The buildings were demolished. Benches, pulpits, confessionals,
breviaries were heaped up and set on fire. A great mountain of books and
furniture blazed on the site of the convent at Clerkenwell. Another pile
was kindled before the ruins of the Franciscan house in Lincoln's Inn
Fields. The chapel in Lime Street, the chapel in Bucklersbury, were
pulled down. The pictures, images and crucifixes were carried along
the streets in triumph, amidst lighted tapers torn from the altars. The
procession bristled thick with swords and staves, and on the point of
every sword and of every staff was an orange. The King's printing house,
whence had issued, during the preceding three years, innumerable tracts
in defence of Papal supremacy, image worship, and monastic vows, was,
to use a coarse metaphor which then, for the first time, came into use,
completely gutted. The vast stock of paper, much of which was still
unpolluted by types, furnished an immense bonfire. From monasteries,
temples, and public offices, the fury of