Note (10) — Chapter III
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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.