It would be an easy task, and perhaps a not uninteresting one, to draw a picture of what Lancashire may be supposed to have been during the reign of Queen Elizabeth—its large forests, its trackless mosses, its many-gabled, moated, timber halls, and its old grey churches, would all form an admirable background to a stage upon which the persecuted Catholic gentry, the almost equally persecuted Puritan, the honest old yeoman and his comely dame, the hard-working husbandman, and the “sturdy beggar,” might be made to act their parts; but this would not be history, and may therefore be left to the hands of the romancer and the novelist.