Mellicent's superintendance
of Ribblesdale. She was a politician of the school of Elizabeth, very
willing to do good to her inferiors, but positively requiring that they
should obey her. Prescription and authority, docility and respect, old
principles and old manners, were her favourite topics; and in preaching
submission to all superiors from the King to the village constable,
precedence and decorum were her constant texts. Her notions were perhaps
urged too far, but this was an age of extremes; the minds of the people
were kept in a continual ferment, every object was distorted, and the
calamities which ensued, in many instances, proceeded more from
ill-directed zeal than positive malice; from fanaticism rather than
hypocrisy. At least a bewildered imagination seems at first to have
actuated the majority of the most eminent commonwealth's men to support
what they deemed a righteous cause, though in their subsequent actions
party-spirit urged them to do what they knew to be sinful, and to
attempt to gloss it with those false colourings which make us now justly
combine the names of hypocrite and fanatic, and hold them up as a
reproach to the age in which they passed for saint and patriot.
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