[389]
The recent attempt of the Romish Church to reestablish its hierarchy in Great Britain, with the new cardinal, Dr. Wiseman, at its head, seems to have revived an old popular custom, a grim piece of Protestant sport, which, since the days of Lord George Gordon and the ‘No Popery’ mob, had very generally fallen into disuse. On the 5th of the eleventh month of this present year all England was traversed by processions and lighted up with bonfires, in commemoration of the detection of the ‘gunpowder plot’ of Guy Fawkes and the Papists in 1605. Popes, bishops, and cardinals, in straw and pasteboard, were paraded through the streets and burned amid the shouts of the populace, a great portion of whom would have doubtless been quite as ready to do the same pleasant little office for the Bishop of Exeter or his Grace of Canterbury, if they could have carted about and burned in effigy a Protestant hierarchy as safely as a Catholic one. In this country, where every sect takes its own way, undisturbed by legal restrictions, each ecclesiasticalLay up the fagots neat and trim;
Pile 'em up higher;
Set 'em afire!
The Pope roasts us, and we'll roast him!Old song.
