The trial of the seven bishops for declining to obey the king's order in council against what, in conscience, they believed to be the law of the land, is the more strictly a parallel case, because, as in Ireland, the whole Popish part of the population—in effect, therefore, the whole physical strength of the land—seemed to have arrayed itself on the side of the conspiracy; so in England, the only armed force, and that close to London, was supposed to have been bought over by the systematic indulgence of the king. Himself and the queen (Mary of Modena) had courted them through the summer. But all was fruitless against the overwhelming sympathy of the troops with an universal popular feeling. Bishop Burnet mentions that this army (about 10,000 men, and then encamped beyond Hounslow) broke into tremendous cheers at the moment when the news of the acquittal reached them. Whilst lauding their Creator his majesty was present. But a far more picturesque account of the case is given by an ancestor of the present Lord Lonsdale's, whose memoirs (still in MS.) are alluded to in one of his Ecclesiastic Sonnets by Mr Wordsworth, our present illustrious laureate. One trait is of a nature so fine, and so inevitable under similar circumstances of interest, that, but for the intervention of the sea, we should certainly have witnessed its repetition on the termination of the Dublin trials. Lord Lowther (such was the title at that time) mentions that, as the bishops came down the Thames in their boat after their acquittal, a perpetual series of men, linked knee to knee, knelt down along the shore. The blessing given, up rose a continuous thunder of huzzas; and these, by a kind of natural telegraph, ran along the streets and the river, through Brentford, and so on to Hounslow. According to the illustration of Lord L., this voice of a nation rolled like a feu-de-joie, or running fire, the who le ten miles from London to Hounslow, within a few minutes; or, like a train of gunpowder laid from London to the camp, this irresistible sentiment finally involved in its torrent evenits professional and hired enemies. Cæsar mentions that such a transmission, telegraphically propagated from mouth to mouth, of a Roman victory, reached himself, at a distance of 160 miles, within about four hours.

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