formerly, and to anticipate the restoration of their worship in all its ancient dignity and splendour.  At this juncture, it is rumoured that a Popish Plot has been discovered.  A distinguished Catholic is arrested on suspicion.  It appears that he has destroyed almost all his papers.  A few letters, however, have escaped the flames; and these letters are found to contain much alarming matter, strange expressions about subsidies from France, allusions to a vast scheme which would “give the greatest blow to the Protestant religion that it had ever received,” and which “would utterly subdue a pestilent heresy.”  It was natural that those who saw these expressions, in letters which had been overlooked, should suspect that there was some horrible villainy in those which had been carefully destroyed.  Such was the feeling of the House of Commons:  “Question, question, Coleman’s letters!” was the cry which drowned the voices of the minority.

Just after the discovery of these papers, a magistrate who had been distinguished by his independent spirit, and who had taken the deposition of the informer, is found murdered, under circumstances which make it almost incredible that he should have fallen either by robbers or by his own hands.  Many of our readers can remember the state of London just after the murders of Mar and Williamson, the terror which was on every face, the careful barring of doors, the providing of blunderbusses and watchmen’s rattles.  We know of a shopkeeper who on that occasion sold three hundred rattles in about ten hours.  Those who remember that panic may be able to form some notion of the state of England after the death of Godfrey.  Indeed, we must say that, after having read and weighed all the evidence now extant on that mysterious subject, we incline to the opinion that he was assassinated, and assassinated by Catholics, not assuredly by Catholics of the least weight or note, but by some of those crazy and vindictive fanatics who may be found in every large sect, and who are peculiarly likely to be found in a persecuted sect.  Some of the violent Cameronians had recently, under similar exasperation, committed similar crimes.

It was natural that there should be a panic; and it was natural that the people should, in a panic, be unreasonable and credulous.  It must be remembered also that they had not at first, as we have, the means of comparing the evidence which was given on different trials.  They were not aware of one tenth part of the contradictions and absurdities which Oates had committed.  The blunders, for example, into which he fell before the Council, his mistake about the person of Don John of Austria, and about the situation of the Jesuits’ College at Paris, were not publicly known.  He was a bad man; but the spies and deserters by whom governments are informed of conspiracies axe generally bad men.  His story was strange and romantic; but it was not more strange and romantic than a well-authenticated Popish plot, which some