s from an attack upon their
premises at night; and, as fearful threats were held out that such an
attack would be made, Purcel, who, as the reader knows, was a man of
great wealth, engaged men to build a strong and high wall about his
house and out-offices, which could now be got at only through a gate of
immense strength, covered with thick sheet-iron, and bound together by
bars of the same metal, in such a way that even the influence of fire
could not destroy it, or enable an enemy to enter.

With such a condition of society before us, it is scarcely necessary to
inform our readers that the privations of the Protestant clergy were not
only great, but dreadful and without precedent. It was not merely that
their style of living was lowered or changed for the worse, but that
they suffered distress of the severest description--want, destitution,
and hunger, in their worst forms. First came inconvenience from a delay
in the receipt of their incomes; then the necessity of asking for a
longer term of credit; after this the melancholy certainty that tithes
would not be paid; again followed the pressure from creditors for
payment, with its distracting and harassing importunities; then the
civil but firm refusal to supply the necessaries of life on further
credit; then again the application to friends, until either the
inclination or ability failed, and benevolence itself was exhausted.
After this came the disposal of books, furniture, and apparel; and, when
these failed, the secret grapple with destitution, the broken spirit,
the want of food--famine, hunger, disease, and, in some cases, death
itself. These great sufferings of a class who, at all events, were
educated gentlemen, did not occur without exciting, on their behalf,
deep and general sympathy from all classes. In their prosperity, the
clergy, as a body, raised and spent their income in the country. They
had been kind and charitable to the poor, and their wives and daughters
had often been ministering angels to those who were neglected by the
landlords or gentry of the neighborhood, their natural protectors. It
is true, an insurrection exhibiting the manifestation of a general and
hostile principle against the source of their support, had spread over
the country; but, notwithstanding its force and violence, the good that
they had done was not forgotten to them in the hour of their trials and
their sorrows. Many a man, for instance, whose voice was loud in the
party pr