manors preserved the beasts of the chase, than if they had been considered as merely objects of sport The laws relating to preservation of game were in every country uncommonly rigorous. They formed in England that odious system of forest laws which distinguished the tyranny of our Norman kings.

Capital punishment for killing a stag or wild boar was frequent, and perhaps warranted by law, until the charter of John. The French code was less severe, but even Henry IV. enacted the pain of death against the repeated offence of chasing deer in the royal forests. The privilege of hunting was reserved to the nobility till the reign of Louis IX., who extended it in some degree to persons of lower birth.

This excessive passion for the sports of the field produced those evils which are apt to result from it; a strenuous idleness, which disdained all useful occupations, and an oppressive spirit toward the peasantry. The devastation committed under the pretence of destroying wild animals, which had been already protected in their depredations, is noticed in serious authors, and has also been the topic of popular ballads... What effect this must have had on agriculture, it is easy to conjecture. The levelling of forests, the draining of morasses, and the extirpation of mischievous animals which inhabit them, are the first objects of man's labor in reclaiming the earth to his use; and these were forbidden by a landed aristocracy, whose control over the progress of agricultural improvement was unlimited, and who had not yet learned to sacrifice their pleasures to their avarice. Hallam.

SKETCHES OF ENGLAND IN 1537.

[The time here described is that in which the struggle between the old Catholic and the new Protestant Faith became a national one.]

IN periods like the present, when knowledge is every day extending, and the habits and thoughts of mankind are perpetually changing under the influence of new discoveries, it is no easy matter to throw ourselves back into a time, in which for centuries the European world grew upon a single type; the forms of the father's thoughts were the forms of the son's, and the late descendant was occupied in treading into paths the footprints of his ancestors.

So absolutely has change become the law of our present condition that it is identified with energy and moral health; to cease to change is to lose place in the great race; and to pass

away from off the earth with the same convictions which we found when we entered it, is to have missed the best object for which we seemed to exist.

It has been, however, with the race of men as it has been with the planet which they inhabit. As we look back over history, we see times of change and progress alternating with other times when life and thought have settled into permanent forms; when mankind, as if by common consent, have ceased to seek for increase of knowledge, and, contented with what they possess, have endeavored to make use of it for the purpose of moral cultivation. Such was the condition of the Greeks through many ages before the Persian war; such was that of the Romans, till the world revenged itself upon its conquerors by the introduction of the habits of the conquered among them.... ...And such again became the condition of Europe when the Northern nations grafted the religion and laws of the Western empire on their own hardy natures, and shaped out that wonderful spiritual and political organisation which remained unshaken for a thousand years... It is difficult to place ourselves in sympathy with times so unlike our own, and our knowledge of them is little more than external. In the alteration of our own character we have lost the key which would unlock the secret of theirs; and the great men even of our own English history before the reformation seem to us almost like the fossil skeletons of another order of beings.

I must take my reader below the surface of outward events to the under-current of the war of opinions, where the forces were generated which gave to the time its life and meaning. Without some insight into this region, history is but a dumb show of phantoms; yet, when we gaze into it with our best efforts, we catch but fitful images and fleeting pictures... In palace and cottage, in village church and metropolitan cathedral, at the board of the Privy Council or in the road-side alehouse, the same questions were discussed, the same passions were agitated. A mysterious change was in process in the minds of men. They knew not what it was, they could not control its speed or guide its direction. A few scenes out of this strange time have been preserved for us out of the records. They may pass one by one before us like the pictures in a magic slide.

The first picture that appears is a friar mendicant, living b the alms of the king's subjects, forming himself to the fashions of the people. He is going about from house to house, and when he comes to aged and to simple people he will say to

them, "Father or sister, what a world this is! It was not so in your father's days. It is a perilous world. They will have no pilgrimages. They will not that we should pray to saints, or fast, or do any good deeds. O Lord, have mercy on us! I will live as my forefathers have done. And I am sure your fathers and friends were good, and ye have followed them hitherto. Continue as ye have done and believe as they believed."

The friar disappears. A neighbour, of the new opinions, who has seen him come and go, takes his place, and then begins an argument. One says, "My father's faith shall be my faith; and the other, hot and foolish, answers, "Thy father was a liar and is in hell, and so is my father in hell also. My father never knew Scripture, and now it is come forth."

The slide again moves. We are in a village church, and there is a window gorgeously painted, representing the various events in the life and death of Thomas à Becket. The king sits on his throne, and speaks fiercely to his four knights. The knights mount their horses and gallop to Canterbury. The archbishop is at vespers in the choir. The knights stride in and smite him dead... Then follows the retribution. In the great central compartment of the window the haughty prince is kneeling naked before the shrine of the martyr, and the monks stand round him and beat him with their rods. All over England in such images of luminous beauty the memory of the great victory of the clergy had been perpetuated... And now the particular church is Woodstock, the court is at the park, and day after day, in the church aisles groups of people assemble to gaze upon the window, and priests and pardoners expatiate with an obvious application on the glories of the martyr, the Church's victory, and the humiliation of the king. Eager ears listen; eager tongues draw comparisons... A

groom

is lounging among the crowd, and interrupts the speakers somewhat disdainfully; he says that he sees no more reason why Becket was a saint than Robin Hood. No word is mentioned of the profanity to Henry; but a priest carries the story to Gardiner and Sir William Paulet. The groom is told that he might as well reason of the king's title as of St. Thomas's; forthwith he is hurried off under charge of heresy to the Tower; and, appealing to Cromwell, there follows a storm at the council table.

We are next at Worcester, at the Lady Chapel, on the eve of the Assumption. There is a famous image of the Virgin there, and to check the superstition of the people the gorgeous dress has been taken off by Cromwell's order. A citizen of Worcester approaches the figure. "Ah, Lady," he cries, "art

thou stripped now? I have seen the day that as clean men had been stripped at a pair of gallows as were they that stripped thee." Then he kisses the image, and turns to the people and says, "Ye that be disposed to offer, the figure is no worse than it was before," "having a remorse unto her."

Again, we find accounts of the reception which the English Bible met with in country parishes.

A circle of Protestants at Wincanton, in Somersetshire, wrote to Cromwell complaining of the curate, who "would not teach them or preach to them, but gave his time and attention to dicing, carding, and bowling"... In their desire for spiritual food they applied to the rector of the next parish, who had come occasionally and given them a sermon, and had taught them to read the New Testament; when suddenly, on Good Friday, "the unthrifty curate entered the pulpit where he had set no foot for years, and admonished his parishioners to give no credence to the new-fangled fellows which read the new books" 66 They be like knaves and Pharisees," he said; "they be like a dog that gnaweth a marrow-bone, and never cometh to the pith, therefore avoid their company; and if any man will preach the New Testament, if I may hear him, I am ready to fight with him incontinent;" and, "indeed," the petitioners said, "he applyeth in such wise his school of fence so sore continually, that he feareth all his parishioners."

...

So the parish clerk at Hastings made a speech to the congregation on the faults of the translation. "It taught heresy," he said; "it taught that a priest might have a wife by God's law. He trusted to see the day that the book called the Bible, and all its maintainers and upholders, should be burnt."

On the other hand, the Protestants gave themselves no pains to make their heterodoxy decent, or to spare the feelings of their antagonists. To call "a spade a spade," and a rogue a rogue, were Protestant axioms. Their favorite weapons were mystery plays, which they acted up and down the country in barns, in taverns, in chambers, on occasion, before the vicargeneral himself; and the language of these, as well as the language of their own daily life, seemed constructed as if to pour scorn on the old belief... Men engaged in a mortal strife usually speak plainly. Blunt words strike home, and the euphuism which, in more ingenious ages, discovers that men mean the same thing when they say opposite things, was unknown or at least unappreciated. On both sides the same obstinate English nature was stirred into energetic hate, which found vent in ribald and blasphemous expressions.

For a thousand years there had been one faith in Western

Christendom. From the isles of Arran to the Danube, thirty generations had followed each other to the grave, who had held all to the same convictions, who had prayed all in the same words. What was this that had gone out among men that they were so changed?

Froude.

CORRUPT STATE OF THE CHURCH BEFORE THE

REFORMATION.

HENRY VIII., a mere boy on his accession, trained from childhood by theologians, entered on his reign saturated with theological prepossessions. The intensity of his nature recognising no half measures, he was prepared to make them the law of his life; and it seemed as if the restoration was to lose no part of its completeness, and that in Henry the church had found a new Alfred or Charlemagne... Unfortunately for the church, institutions may be restored in theory; but theory, be it ever so perfect, will not give them back their life; and Henry discovered, at length, that the church of the sixteenth century was no more like that of the eleventh, than Leo X. resembled Hildebrand, or poor Warham, St. Anselm.

If, however, there were no longer saints among the clergy, there could still arise among them a remarkable man; and in Cardinal Wolsey the King found an adviser who was able to retain him longer than would otherwise have been possible in the course which he had entered upon; who, holding a middle place between an English statesman and a catholic of the old order, was essentially a transition minister; who was qualified above all men then living, by a combination of talent, honesty, and arrogance, to open questions which could not again be closed when they had escaped the grasp of their originator... Under Wolsey's influence, Henry made war with Louis of France, in the Pope's quarrel, entered the polemic lists with Luther, and persecuted the English Protestants. But Wolsey could not blind himself to the true condition of the church... He was too wise to be deceived with outward prosperity; he knew well that there lay before it, on the continent and at home, the alternative of ruin or amendment; and therefore he familiarised Henry with the sense that a reformation was inevitable; and, dreaming that it could be effected from within, by the church itself, inspired with a wiser spirit, he himself fell the first victim of a convulsion which he had assisted to create, and which he attempted too late to stay.

His intended measures were approaching maturity, when all