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50 believes in witchcraft,—as did many other learned and pious men,—and he persists in upsetting all our notions of galley slaves and the tragic horror of their lot by affirming the miserable creatures at Marseilles to be "cheerful and full of knavery," and hardly ever without some trifling occupation at which they toiled in free moments, and by which they made a little money for the luxuries and comforts that they craved.

In fact, an air of sincere and inevitable truthfulness robs John Evelyn's diary of all that is romantic and sentimental. We see in it the life of a highly cultivated and deeply religious man, whose fate it was to witness all those tremendous and sovereign changes which swept over England like successive tidal waves between the execution of the Earl of Strafford and the accession of Queen Anne. Sharp strife; the bitter contention of creeds; England's one plunge into republicanism, and her abrupt withdrawal from its grim embraces; the plague; the great fire, with "ten thousand houses all in one flame;" the depth of national corruption under the last Stuarts; the obnoxious and unpalatable remedy