The Man Who Laughs


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II.  
In Anne's time no meeting was allowed without the permission of two  
justices of the peace. The assembly of twelve persons, were it only to  
eat oysters and drink porter, was a felony. Under her reign, otherwise  
relatively mild, pressing for the fleet was carried on with extreme  
violence--a gloomy evidence that the Englishman is a subject rather than  
a citizen. For centuries England suffered under that process of tyranny  
which gave the lie to all the old charters of freedom, and out of which  
France especially gathered a cause of triumph and indignation. What in  
some degree diminishes the triumph is, that while sailors were pressed  
in England, soldiers were pressed in France. In every great town of  
France, any able-bodied man, going through the streets on his business,  
was liable to be shoved by the crimps into a house called the oven.  
There he was shut up with others in the same plight; those fit for  
service were picked out, and the recruiters sold them to the officers.  
In 1695 there were thirty of these ovens in Paris.  
The laws against Ireland, emanating from Queen Anne, were atrocious.  
Anne was born in 1664, two years before the great fire of London, on  
which the astrologers (there were some left, and Louis XIV. was born  
with the assistance of an astrologer, and swaddled in a horoscope)  
predicted that, being the elder sister of fire, she would be queen. And  
so she was, thanks to astrology and the revolution of 1688. She had the  
humiliation of having only Gilbert, Archbishop of Canterbury, for  
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