Within The Shadow Of The Shaft.

irreconcileable . . . He made no further reflections on the matter till the City was burnt . Then he began to suspect that there had been a design , and that they had intended to draw him into it , and to lay the odium of it upon the Dutch . But he could hear no news of those who had sent that projiosition to him . " * There is , a little later on , a still more interesting passage , although it probably bears traces of the exhibition of warmth of feeling evoked at

. the time of the Popish Plot : " Tillotson , who believed that the City was burnt on design , told me a circumstance that made the Papists employing a crazed man" ( it will be remembered that Hubert , who was executed , was in all probability insane ) " in such a service more credible . Langhorn the Popish Conncillor-at-Law , who for many years passed as a Protestant , ! was despatching a half-witted man to manage elections in Kent before the Restoration .

Tillotson being present , and observing what a sort of man he was , asked Langhorn how he could employ him in such services . Langhorn answered it was a maxim with him in dangerous services to employ none but half-witted men , if they could be but secret and obey orders ; for if they should change their minds and turn informers instead of agents , it would be easy to discredit them , and to carry off the weight of any discoveries they could make by

shewing they were madmen , and so not likely to be trusted in critical things . "J No one who knows me can charge me with lack of reverence for , much less with want of tenderness in dealing with , the former standard faith of my beloved country . As Mr . Morley says of Edmund Burke , § I never have , I trust I never shall , lose " a large and generous way of thinking about the more ancient creed , " but I am bound in candour to admit that principles and

practice like those of Mr . Langhorn , whether existent in fact or popularly believed to be adopted by members of the Roman Catholic Communion , without clue enquiry made , will go a great way to account for , if not to justify , the distrust Protestants felt towards them during the latter half of the seventeenth century . It will be noticed that Burnet dismisses without a word the indubitable fact that the mad ( supposed ) agent Hubert did not appear upon the scene until the flames had been spreading for three whole days and nights .

Of the fire itself there is little more to be said . Everybod y knows how it raged until the night of Wednesday , the 5 th of September , and then stopped suddenly—not ( at that point at all events ) arrested b y artificial measures—at Pie Corner , near Smithfielcl , thus having ravaged Old London from the South-East to the North-West . One Puritan preacher founded on the fact of the localities of the commencement and conclusion of the conflagration a punning argument that the disaster had been brought upon the city by a too general indul

gence in the vice of gluttony since the Restoration . Said he—from a Nonconforming pulpit— " the calamity could not be occasioned b y the sin of blasphemy , for in that case it would have begun at Billingsgate" ( even then , it appears , a locality notorious for good fish and bad language ) ; " nor lewdness , for then Drui-y Lane would have been first on fire ; nor l ying , for then the flames had reached them from Westminster Hall" ( rough on the lawyersthis ) ; " no beloved

, , my , it was occasioned by the sin of gluttony , for it began at Pudding Lane and ended at Pie Corner . " While the termination of the shadow of the shaft is said , as I have before observed , to denote at a certain hour of the day the site where this terrible episode in our Metropolitan chronicles began , the spot where it at length