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 repeated, their reports, aided by the artful insinuations of Father Morris, soon produced rumours throughout the city, that the Queen was violently in love with Prince Ferdinand, and had gone mad because the law did not permit her to marry him. The effect this idea produced was prodigious; it was implicitly believed, for the lower classes are naturally fond of the marvellous, and, when there are two sides to a question, are very seldom disposed to err by judging too favourably; whilst the indignation it excited was unbounded. In some cases, men are more tenacious of their prejudices than of their rights. Thus, then, though the English, by consenting to the marriage of their Queen, had deprived themselves of the important right of electing their own Sovereign; they considered what they had done as trifling, when compared with the horror they felt at the thought of submitting to a foreign King: whilst, the emissaries of Rosabella, taking advantage of this feeling, by alternately playing upon their fears, and magnifying their terrors, worked them up almost to a state of desperation.