ELIZABETH BUNYAN, would support this sentence." Nevertheless, the poor tinker, with wife and children dependent on charity, was but a pigmy antagonist against such powerful enemies ; and matters were beginning to wear a very serious aspect. His wife, Elizabeth, now displayed a boldness of spirit and firmness of action which raised her to the dignity of a heroine. She resolved to journey to London, a distance of fifty miles, in order to present a petition to the House of Lords, begging for her husband's liberty. Regardless of the state of the roads,-which ren- dered even travelling by coach a troublesome matter at the time,-or of the perplexities of the mazes of London to one who had, probably, never been beyond the bounds of her native village before, she set out, full of courage and hope. London, in the middle of the seventeenth century, although not so bewildering a place as its leviathan namesake of the nineteenth, was still sufficiently a labyrinth to one accustomed only to grassy dells and glades. It was comparatively small,-there were " garden-houses" about Aldersgate, and noble- men's palaces in Drury Lane and Fleet Street, while Berkeley Square was a favourite resort of gentlemen fond of snipe shooting ; but the extreme narrowness of the leading thoroughfares-which at the appearance of a modern omnibus would have stood aghast-struck even old John Evelyn, accustomed as he was to the sight. The black and white wooden houses, with overhanging beetling upper stories, 18
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