A silenced minister has more mercy on the Government in a secure conventicle than he has on the company that he is in.

Their proceedings were regulated by five persons, each of whom presided in a separate conventicle, and kept his followers in ignorance of the names of the brethren associated under the four remaining leaders.

The human interest which our author sheds about the mill, the carpenter's shop, the dairy, the village church, and even the stiff, uninviting conventicle, shows that she looks on these as having a living continuity with the people whom she sets among them.

These are the chief: to number o'er the rest, And stand, like Adam, naming every beast, Were weary work; nor will the muse describe 310 A slimy-born and sun-begotten tribe; Who far from steeples and their sacred sound, In fields their sullen conventicles found.