rhymes, in which, giving a "short swatch" of his creed, he thus proclaims himself Nor Asgilite, nor Bess Clarksonian, Nor Mountaineer, nor Mugletonian;” * and, at a later date, I might mention that singular piece of scurrilous versification, in the shape of an anonymous lampoon upon Whitfield, which owes half its raciness to the fact that it professes to proceed from a Muggletonian pen.† Nor have more serious authors been kinder to the memory of the founders of this out-of-the-way sect, and the principles they professed. Even well informed persons are in the habit of mixing up Muggletonians and Fifth Monarchy Men,‡ as if the two were identical. When we find so genial and so acute a critic as Robert Alfred Vaughan § sanctioning a street, London, August the 18th, 1693. In a Letter to a Gentleman in the Country. Tom Brown's Works, 9th edition, 1760, vol. iv, pp. 142-6. A curious plate, accompanying this edition, represents the Devil in one corner, engaged in tying the knot. * Vide Epistle to Mr. James Arbuckle of Belfast, January, 1719; in the Glasgow Edition of Ramsay's Poems, 1770, pp. 149-153. In a note, p. 152, we find, Mugletonian: a kind of quakers, so called from one Mugleton. See Leslie's snake in the grass." + The following is the full title-page of this unseemly production: The Amourous Humours, and Audacious Adventures, of one WH††††††††D. By a Muggletonian. "Jew, Turk and Christian differ but in CREED; In ways of wickedness they 're all agreed: None upwards clear the Road; they part and cavil: London; printed for the Author, and sold by M. Watson, next the King's See Letter, by J. H. D [ixon], Inquirer, 3rd Jan., 1863. § "The Muggletonians, Fifth Monarchy Men, and Ranters of those days were the exceptional mire and dirt cast up by the vexed times, but assuredly not the similar confusion, we need not wonder that writers less precise fall into the mistake. Lord Macaulay, as a matter of course, avoids this error; but the one sentence in which he deigns to address himself to our subject is full of contemptuous unfairness. It runs thus: "A mad tailor, named Lodowick Muggleton, wandered from pothouse to pothouse, tippling ale, and denouncing eternal torments against all those who refused to believe, on his testimony, that the Supreme Being was only six feet high, and that the sun was just four miles from the earth.”* No one seems to have taken in hand to write the life of the man here alluded to, if we except the unknown author of a malicious pamphlet, brought out in 1677, on the occasion of Muggleton's being placed in the pillory.† This piece has evidently been made use of by the compiler of the brief notice of Muggleton in Chambers' "Book of Days.": It is, however, quite untrustworthy. More recently Mr. Hain Friswell has included a paper on Lodowick Muggleton in his "Readings from Rare Books." This paper is of little or no value. Misled by the absence of the name from the Census returns of 1851, it speaks of the Muggletonians as being by this time extinct. § They are, I believe, about as numerous now as ever they were; representatives of English mysticism."-Hours with the Mystics, 1856, vol. ii., p. 255. * History of England, 1848, vol. i., p. 164. + A modest Account of the wicked Life of that grand Impostor, Lodowick Muggleton: Wherein are related all the remarkable Actions he did, and all the strange Accidents that have befallen him, ever since his first Coming to London, to this Twenty-fifth of January, 1676. Also a Particular of those Reasons which first drew him to these damnable Principles: With several pleasant Stories concerning him, proving his Commission to be but counterfeit, and himself a Cheat, from divers Expressions which have fallen from his own Mouth. Licensed according to Order. Printed at London, for B. H., in 1676 [1677], 4to, pp. 6. Reprinted, Harleian Miscellany, 1744, vol. i., p. 593. Book of Days, 1864, Vol. i., p. 362. notice appears, is an error. The date (March 12) under which this § Varia; Readings from Rare Books, 1866, pp. 241, 250. and the writings of their recognised founders, which are constantly kept in print, are neither scarce nor dear, but may be had without any difficulty, on applying to the proper quarter. * Casual The rise of the Muggletonians is a very significant fact of that general surging up of the undercurrents of English religious life, which characterised the middle of the seventeenth century. The abnormal forms of English religion at that date have for the most part been sketched by our Church historians in a style both faint and loose, without firmness of outline, and without love for the work. readers are certainly not aware what great and what varied forces of zeal and of activity were at work two hundred years ago, among what we may term the outlandish sects. People who took up Mr. Hepworth Dixon's recent volumes on "New America" were both startled and shocked at the multiplicity and strangeness of the religious communities which he describes as existing now in full vigour across the Atlantic, contemporaneously with our ripest civilisation. But exactly the same phenomena are apparent to the student of men and manners who will visit the obscure corners and travel on the by-paths of the religious history of the Commonwealth. I do not know that England contained then a community of Polygamists, or that America contains now a community of Muggletonians; but if these be exceptions, they are about the only exceptions to the completeness of the parallel. Outside the more orderly Churches, whose history is tolerably well known,-the Catholics, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Independents, and Baptists,-a host of minor sectaries sprang up and flourished before or about the year 1650. Of these some went by a name derived from the founder of their school, as the Brownists, the Bidellians, the Behmenists, the * Mr. William Cates, 4, Gloucester Cottages, Loughborough Park, Brixton, S., will supply any of them to purchasers. Coppinists, the Salmonists, the Traskites, the Tryonists. Others were designated by their cardinal doctrine, as the Sabbatarians, or Seventh-Day Baptists; the Millennarians, or Fifth Monarchy Men; the Virgin Life People. Some chose their own distinctive title, as the Seekers or Waiters, the Family of Love, the Philadelphians. Others, again, such as the Dippers, the Ranters, the Shakers, the Heavenly Father Men, bore a nickname imposed by the ever ready wit of the populace. Some of these were rather Societies than Sects; and, like the early Methodists or the early Swedenborgians, went to church or conventicle at the usual hours of worship, and met for their own purposes at other times. But the tendency of Commonwealth freedom was to sectarianise these societies; just as afterwards the tendency of Restoration uniformity was to extinguish them. To this motley assemblage of Sects, George Fox added, in the year 1649, the Society of Friends, soon to become better known by the soubriquet of "Quaker," due to the harsh humour of Mr. Gervas Bennet, justice of the peace at Derby, whom George Fox, under examination before him in 1650, had bid "Tremble at the word of the Lord!"* Not long after, in 1652, John Reeve and Lodowicke Muggleton came forward with a new doctrine, and the uncouth term Muggletonian began to be pronounced. † It is not, like the word Quaker, considered a nickname, unless perhaps by younger members of the present body; and the substitutes for it, such as "Believers in the Third Record," or "Believers in the Commission of the Spirit," are too longwinded and p. 25. * History of the People called Quakers, by William Sewell, 2nd edition, 1725. + The first recorded use of the word I have found is in an abusive speech by Chief Justice Rainsford, at the Old Bailey, 17th January, 1677. "You see he has got a set of them, and makes them call themselves Muggletonians, after his cursed name."-True Account of the Trial and Sufferings of Lodowick Muggleton, by [Nathaniel] Powell, edition of 1808, p. 6. See Letter, by William Ridsdale, Inquirer, 21st March, 1863. inexpressive for general adoption, even by Muggletonians themselves. One circumstance which leads us to class together Quakers and Muggletonians is the remarkable fate which has made them almost the only representatives, in modern times, of that abnormal religious life of England, which produced so many singular phenomena in the heart of the seventeenth century. Not that all those sects, of which I have enumerated some, have quite faded out, so as to "leave not a rack behind." Some have developed beyond their first incipient stages. Some have been absorbed in stronger and more consistent bodies. Some have sobered down into good Christian common sense. The Seventh Day Baptists can yet show you the ghost of a Saturday congregation in the East of London; and in America are said to thrive. Plenty of orthodox persons may be found, I believe, at this day, who hold the distinctive doctrine of the Millennaries, that Christ will soon come to reign on earth for the space of a thousand years; though the old fury, which was occasionally roused in the Fifth Monarchy Men, has never inspired their modern representatives. Still, for practical purposes, the wellknown and everywhere respected Society of Friends, and the extremely obscure body of Muggletonians may be treated as the sole survivors of the commonwealth sects. Seekers, like pious John Saltmarsh, have left behind them no successors; Ranters, like John Robins, or the misguided and poetical Abiezer Coppe, have passed from human ken; Behmenists, like Humphrey Blunden or Durand Hotham, or that learned and reverend visionary Dr. John Pordage, and Philadelphians, after the fashion of Jane Lead and Dr. Francis Lee, we look for in vain to-day; but George Fox and Lodowicke Muggleton still find zealous and trusting disciples. * * Of Churches and Sects, or Societies, in England, Alexander Ross, in his |