After much
agitated deliberation, he conceived it best to continue the same
appearance of submission and tranquillity, hoping that thus he might in
time either propitiate the wretches in whose hands he was, or, by his
apparent inoffensiveness, procure such opportunities of indulgence, as
might perhaps ultimately facilitate his escape. He therefore determined
to conduct himself with the utmost tranquillity, and never to let his
voice be heard in the house; and he laid down several other resolutions
with a degree of prudence which he already shuddered to think might be
the cunning of incipient madness, or the beginning result of the horrid
habits of the place. These resolutions were put to desperate trial that very night. Just next
to Stanton’s apartment were lodged two most uncongenial neighbours. One
of them was a puritanical weaver, who had been driven mad by a single
sermon from the celebrated Hugh Peters, and was sent to the mad-house as
full of election and reprobation as he could hold,--and fuller. He
regularly repeated over the _five points_ while day-light lasted, and
imagined himself preaching in a conventicle with distinguished success;
towards twilight his visions were more gloomy, and at midnight his
blasphemies became horrible. In the opposite cell was lodged a loyalist
tailor, who had been ruined by giving credit to the cavaliers and their
ladies,--(for at this time, and much later, down to the reign of Anne,
tailors were employed by females even _to make_ and _fit on their
stays_),--who had run mad with drink and loyalty on the burning of the
Rump, and ever since had made the cells of the mad-house echo with
fragments of the ill-fated Colonel Lovelace’s songs, scraps from
Cowley’s “Cutter of Coleman street,” and some curious specimens from Mrs
Aphra Behn’s plays, where the cavaliers are denominated the _heroicks_,
and Lady Lambert and Lady Desborough represented as going to meeting,
their large Bibles carried before them by their pages, and falling in
love with two banished cavaliers by the way.--“Tabitha, Tabitha,” cried
a voice half in exultation and half in derision; “thou shalt go with thy
hair curled, and thy breasts naked;”--and then added in an affected
voice,--“I could dance the Canaries once, spouse.” This never failed to
rouse the feelings, or rather operate on the instincts of the puritanic
weaver, who immediately answered, “Colonel Harrison shall come out of
the west, riding on a sky-coloured mule, which signifies
instruction(10).” “Ye lie, ye round-head son of a b----h,” roared the
cavalier tailor, “Colonel Harrison will be damned before he ever mounts
a sky-coloured mule;” and he concluded this pithy sentence with
fragments of anti-Oliverian songs. “And may I live to see
     Old Noll upon a tree,
     And many such as he;
     Confound him, confound him,
     Diseases all around him.”

  (10) Vide Cutter of Coleman street. “Ye are honest gentlemen, I can play many tunes,” squeaked a poor mad
loyalist fiddler, who had been accustomed to play in the taverns to the
cavalier party, and just remembered the words of a similar minstrel
playing for Colonel Blunt in the committee. “Then play me the air to
“Rebellion is breaking up house,” exclaimed the tailor, dancing wildly
about his cell (as far as his chains allowed him) to an imaginary
measure. The weaver could contain no longer. “How long, Lord, how long,”
he exclaimed, “shall thine enemies insult thy sanctuary, in which I have
been placed an anointed teacher? even here, where I am placed to preach
to the souls in prison?--Open the flood-gates of thy power, and though
thy waves and storms go over me, let me testify in the midst of them,
even as he who spreadeth forth his hands to swim may raise one of them
to warn his companion that he is about to sink.--Sister Ruth, why dost
thou uncover thy bosom to discover my frailty?--Lord, let thine arm of
power be with us as it was when thou brakest the shield, the sword, and
the battle,--when thy foot was dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and
the tongue of thy dogs was red through the same.--Dip all thy garments
in blood, and let me weave thee fresh when thou art stained.--When shall
thy saints tread the wine-press of thy wrath? Blood! blood! the saints
call for it, earth gapes to swallow it, hell thirsts for it!--Sister
Ruth, I pray thee, conceal thy bosom, and be not as the vain women of
this generation.--Oh for a day like that, a day of the Lord of hosts,
when the towers fell!--Spare me in the battle, for I am not a mighty man
of war; leave me in the rear of the host, to curse, with the curse of
Meroz, those who come not to the help of the Lord against the
mighty,--even to curse this malignant tailor,--yea, curse him
bitterly.--Lord, I am in the tents of Kedar, my feet stumble on the dark
mountains,--I fall,--I fall!”--And the poor wretch, exhausted by his
delirious agonies, fell, and grovelled for some time in his straw. “Oh! I have had a grievous fall,--Sister Ruth,--Oh Sister Ruth!--Rejoice not
against me, Oh mine enemy! though I fall, I shall rise again.” Whatever
satisfaction Sister Ruth might have derived from this assurance, if she
could have heard it, was enjoyed tenfold by the weaver, whose amorous
reminiscences were in a moment exchanged for war-like ones, borrowed
from a wretched and disarranged mass of intellectual rubbish. “The Lord
is a man of war,” he shouted.--“Look to Marston Moor!--Look to the city,
the proud city, full of pride and sin!--Look to the waves of the Severn,
as red with blood as the waves of the Red Sea!--There were the hoofs
broken by means of the prancings, the prancings of the mighty
ones.--Then, Lord, was thy triumph, and the triumph of thy saints, to
bind their kings in chains, and their nobles in links of iron.” The
malignant tailor burst out in his turn: “Thank the false Scots, and
their solemn league and covenant, and Carisbrook Castle, for that, ye
crop-eared Puritan,” he yelled. “If it had not been for them, I would
have taken measure of the king for a velvet cloak as high as the Tower
of London, and one flirt of its folds would have knocked the “copper
nose” into the Thames, and sent it a-drift to Hell.” “Ye lie, in your
teeth,” echoed the weaver; “and I will prove it unarmed, with my shuttle
against your needle, and smite you to the earth thereafter, as David
smote Goliath. It was _the man’s_ (such was the indecent language in
which Charles the First was spoken of by the Puritans)--it was the man’s
carnal, self-seeking, world-loving, prelatical hierarchy, that drove the
godly to seek the sweet word in season from their own pastors, who
righteously abominated the Popish garniture of lawn-sleeves, lewd
organs, and steeple houses.