val. It has the natural advantages of a bold bluff of rock overlooking a vast fertile plain, and a magnificent river bordered with docks, spanned by a beautiful bridge, and adorned on each side with a line of varied and picturesque buildings. No feature in the scenery speaks more eloquently of the diversity of races that are mingled there, of the largeness of view, and the respect for others which lie at the root of all constitutional government, than the Jewish Synagogue, which is the most remarkable and the most prominent of all the buildings of the town. On the right bank of the river is concentrated all that is most especially German. It is there that the artillery is placed and the garrison lodged by which the town is held in check. On the left bank there is a panorama illustrative of all that is most especially Hungarian. The gentry of the district still walk about in gorgeous dresses, and seem as if they had just dismounted from or were just going to a crusade. The ladies walk about on a summer evening as if at a ball, with the boddice, the short skirt, and the lively colors that in Western Europe are only seen at the Opera, but which there seem natural and decorous, and the every-day dress of women who have become refined without ceasing to be picturesque. Along the streets saunter gaunt figures dressed in sheepskin, savages from the wild plains of the Lower Danube, barbarians such as the Romans found there in the days of TRAJAN. To this capital the Emperor of AUSTRIA came to be crowned, and the coronation was as ceremonious and as imposing as any spectacle must be that draws its details from the history of a thousand years. To men like the Hungarians, in whose hearts antiquity is still alive, ritualism and ceremony are realities Every stage of the coronation was the relic or the embodiment of some great passage in Hungarian history, and yet each stage was as complete, as impressive, and as dignified in itself as if it had been expressly designed by the most inventive of ritualist intellects to awe, astonish, and inform the spectator. The religious ceremony at Buda, where the Emperor and Empress had the holy, mysterious, sacred crown placed on them, received the holy unction, and took the vows of obe

dience to the Church and the laws, was succeeded by the great secular ceremony at Pesth of swearing fidelity to the Constitution. And then at the end came the quaint but most picturesque scene of the artificial mound, when the crowned King rose up, and in the sight of his people drew his sword towards the four quarters of the heavens, as a pledge that he would be true and loyal to his subjects from whatever quarter danger or menace might come.

Nor was it only the gorgeousness or the solemnity of the ceremony that gave it its special and distinctive character, and made it unlike anything in Western Europe. In Hungary individuals still play the chief parts in the drama of history. The nobles who attended the ceremony came each with his own retinue, each in his appropriate dress, with his own banners and his own peculiar apparel, just as the Knight Crusaders joined each for himself the long array that moved on to the Holy City. To each man there this coronation was a victory of his own winning, and was dear to him with the dearness of a personal triumph. What makes this coronation a thing quite by itself was that it was a celebration of a victory held in honor of the vanquished. No one who does not know through what humiliation, through what long agonies of suspense, through what vicissitudes of despair and hope, the Hungarians have clung to the cause of their country, can appreciate the thrill of joy with which these Hungarian nobles and gentlemen must have attended the coronation of Francis Joseph. For nineteen years, through revolution and rebellion and military tyranny and crafty negotiations backwards and forwards, they have held firm to the one tenet that the heir of the Hapsburgs was nothing to them unless he was their crowned King, bound by their laws, and solemnly sworn to uphold their Constitution. It was in vain that Austrian lawyers expounded to them the theory that, as they had been conquered, the Constitution was at an end. They would not hear of a doctrine they thought so false and slavish. They stuck firmly to their great point, that Hungary was a constitutional country, and could have none but a constitutional King. Each individual felt this and said this, and sup

ported his neighbors in saying it. The Government of Austria was nothing to them. They would not obey it. Main force might compel them to outward submission, but they would not yield to it as men yield to that which they respect and allow. All Constitutions flourish through and are founded on this bravery, or it may be called obstinacy, of individuals. And if the individuals who are obstinate are not too few or too high above the mass of their countrymen, the stronger is the Constitution. It is not the opposition of a few great nobles, but the opposition of many small nobles or gentlemen, each respected in his district, that gives force to a Constitution. The Crown may exile, or behead, or cajole a few great nobles, as it did in France; but it must ultimately succumb to the opposition of an indefinite number of small gentry, each of whom is firmly convinced he is right, and each of whom is willing to undergo great privations and great poverty rather than abandon the glorious inheritance of freedom that has descended to him from his fathers. Last Saturday these gentlemen each enjoyed his hour of keen personal triumph. The Constitution had won its own through and by him. Generally what may be termed the ruck of a procession, the undistinguished mass taking part in a grand pageant, are nobodies, have done nothing, feel nothing, wish nothing, except that the crowd may admire their fine clothes, and think with appropriate envy what gay and great folks they must be. But at Pesth the meanest and the poorest and the humblest Magyar was a victor, and saw in the celebration of his victory the reward which, of all earthly rewards, he prized most highly.

Perhaps in all constitutional history there has been no triumph at once so great and so pure. In England alone can we look for a parallel. For Hungary alone of all European nations has guarded its Constitution, and prized its laws, and succeeded in maintaining its ancestral free Government with an English tenacity and success. And yet where in English history are we to find anything like this crowning of FRANCIS JOSEPH? Every now and then we have had a coronation which has marked an epoch in our history. The coronations, for example, of

WILLIAM and MARY, of GEORGE III., and of VICTORIA, have all been in their way remarkable. But when WILLIAM III. and his wife were crowned there was great regret at the sad necessity of crowning them, and at the upsetting of the old hereditary right; and half the nation at least was not sure whether it was doing right. The accession of GEORGE III. began a new era, for he was the first King for nearly half a century who was an Englishman, and his reign put an end once for all to the possibility of a civil war. Queen VICTORIA came, with the promises of girlhood and the influences of an uncorrupted nature, to heal the strife and calm the waters in which her unfortunate uncles had been so long plunging without effect or dignity. So far as each of these Sovereigns held out, on acceding to the Crown, the hope of a brighter future for the country, and epitomized some kind of constitutional gain, their coronations may be compared with that of FRANCIS JOSEPH. But they all fell far short of his position at Pesth last week in this-that his coronation had been won from him against his will, and yet was itself a sign that bitterness and division were at an end. The Hungarians are as glad that FRANCIS JOSEPH is their crowned king as he can be. They know how invaluable it is to them that they should have a monarch whose authority is to be the mainspring of their political system, and yet who can inspire them with a perfect confidence that he will not break or destroy the instrument with which he works. They have suffered terribly during all these long years of sad suspense. They have been impoverished, disheartened, without hope for themselves or their children. They are very glad that their time of trial is now over, and they have no resentment against their KING, nor any desire to nurse angry passions against him and his race. That which comes nearest in English history to the scene of last Saturday is the progress of CHARLES II. on his restoration, when the people seemed to be mad with joy, and to find no words warm enough to express their welcome. But CHARLES II. came as the conqueror, not the conquered; and if one faction hailed him as the saviour of his country, another faction re

garded his accession as the last stroke of affliction that had been dealt out to the good and the righteous. The coronation of FRANCIS JOSEPH, on the contrary, gave unmixed pleasure. But even if we can find no parallel in English history, yet that we have to look to English history, and to it alone, for something like a parallel, is surely worthy of observation. That constitutionalism is a mere "matter of race was a favorite theory of philosophers not long ago. We in England were free because freedom was essentially Teutonic. No nation could be really free unless its ancestors had been described in the Germany of TACITUS. And yet the nation second only to the English in the history of constitutionalism is not Teutonic, nor even European, but Asiatic by origin and Turkish. There is comfort to be derived from this, for it seems to put a strong barrier in the way of the race theory of constitutionalism. At any rate the coronation at Pesth is a satisfaction to Englishmen, in a way and to a degree far beyond anything that other nations can feel. It is a tribute to us and our merits that anything so like what is our own should be so successful; and we may be almost as proud and as much delighted as Magyars when we read the details of this most affecting scene, and picture to ourselves the successive incidents of the coronation.

Fraser's Magazine.

THE EXCLUSION OF THE CLERGY FROM SEATS IN THE HOUSE

OF COMMONS.

THE legislature of Great Britain, unlike all other representative bodies, has formally declared that the clergy of the Established Churches of England, Scotland, and Ireland are ineligible for seats in Parliament, and has ratified this declaration by a statute, 41 Geo. III. cap. 63. By the provisions of the Emancipation Act of 1839, this disability is extended to Roman Catholic priests. It is to be observed that the disability is not functional, but personal. It not only affects those who are beneficed, or are otherwise engaged in the "cure of souls," or are possessed of an office, the cccupation

of which is conditioned by admission to holy orders; but those who have been ordained either as deacon or priest in the English Church, or have been made ministers in the Scotch Church. The customary penalties on sitting or voting in the House, in case a constituency returns an undetected clergyman, are to be inflicted when the discovery is made. Finally, the election of a clergyman is to be declared void.

The circumstances which attended this act of seclusion, and the reasonings which justified the provisions of Horne Tooke's Act, in the eyes of those who "declared and enacted" them, are very little known. Ninety-nine educated persons out of every hundred who talk on the subject, are under the impression that the exclusion of the clergy is due to a standing resolution of the House of Commons only. Not one person in a thousand perhaps is acquainted with the facts which preceded and accompanied the Act of 1801, when a Committee of the House of Commons decided with great rapidity on a subject requiring minute historical research, and the House itself, from personal hostility to a man who had been lately introduced to it, disabled at least 15,000 individuals of the upper middle class from a seat in parliament. In order to understand these facts, it will be necessary to give a slight sketch' of the early constitution of Parliament, as well as to advert to the reasons which made Horne Tooke so unpopular with the ministry, that they could pass the Act.

Parliaments, as most persons now know, were originally summoned in order to grant taxes. The machinery of Parliament was borrowed, it appears, from those clerical Convocations, which had long been familiar with demands of aid from Rome, and which distributed customary charges upon the tenants of ecclesiastical fees, when the charge was claimable As the taxes leviable on these tenants were derived from income, those on the lay tenants from personal property; as the value of a benefice was known, and on the whole fixed, the amount of personal property fluctuating; as therefore a grant only was essential to the taxation of the clerical income, and an assessment by sworn

collectors was needed when a fifteenth was levied; and, furthermore, as the tenure of ecclesiastical income was sharply distinguished from that of lay persons -Parliament and Convocation made separate grants. It was the interest of the clergy to maintain this separation, for it is clear that the grants of a clerical tenth and a lay twentieth do not indicate equal sacrifices to the exchequer, the first having been paid from income, the second from goods, and in boroughs from stocksin-trade.

Taxes granted in convocation extended to ecclesiastical fees, even though they were possessed by lay persons, or lay corporations. The first college founded in Oxford, the type in fact of all such academical institutions, was eminently a lay corporation. Merton laid no condition of taking orders on his fellows. He peremptorily excludes monks from his benefaction. But a considerable portion of his endowment was obtained from impropriated tithes. Whenever Convocation grants an aid to the king or the pope, or the nuncio, or to cardinals visiting England, the college is taxed by Convocation. But on all its lay fees, it contributes through the king's collectors.

So again, a lay fee held by an ecclesiastic was liable to those customary or exceptional charges which either belonged of right to the Crown, or might be imposed by parliamentary grant. A very cursory inspection of the lay taking rolls in the Public Record Office, will show that clergymen specially so designated, i. e. as rectors or vicars, contributed to these subsidies from their lay fees. There is no reason to think that the case of John of Gatesden was solitary, who is said by Matthew Paris (1245) to have been possessed of many benefices and many lay fees, to have resigned the former, to have been knighted by the king at Christmas, and to have married a daughter of the house of Bruce. The monk of St. Albans gives no hint that, in his day, there was any canonical impediment to the step, but observes: "curam exuens animarum periculosam, ad magnorum Procerum dignitatem advolavit. Unde multi nobiles origine, mente autem ignobiles invidentes, illi cito postea laqueos NEW SERIES-VOL. VI, No. 2.

gravaminis præpararunt; quorum invidorum molimina Johannes, invidiosus, nen sine difficultate, prudenter evasit." Similarly John Bigod, younger brother of Roger, is said by Hemingburgh to have been one of the wealthiest men in England, and heir to the lands of his brother, but to have been an ecclesiastic. In the days when all learning was the property of the clergy, it is unreasonable to believe that they were necessarily excluded from the House of Commons. Many cases occur in the rolls of Parliament in which the member returned as elected to represent a county or borough is designated as a clerk. Nor is the absence of this appellation negative proof against the previous ordination of an individual. There has not been, till comparatively late times, any custom of distinguishing clergymen by a prefix to their names.

The title of reverend was long ago assigned to the superior ecclesiastics, but as late certainly as the days of Walton, it was not given to the ordinary clergymen. Willis, one of the most precise and accurate men of his day, is by no means regular in the use of the prefix as late even as 1750. A large collection of his letters to Humphrey Owen, then Bodley's librarian, exists in Bodley's library. In his addresses to these letters he leaves out "reverend" as often as he uses it. The writer has heard of oldfashioned clergymen, who have declined to use a title to which they had no legal right. When the clergyman was unbeneficed, or retired from the cure of souls, he might, if he choose, become unobservedly a lay person. Before the reformation, the ordinary dress of the secular clergy was not different from that of laymen. The costume of clergymen at the present time is (some peculiar affectations excepted), just as with the Quakers, the adherence to what was once the general style of dress adopted by grave and decorous persons.

The cases quoted against the admission of the clergy to the House of Commons, before the passing of Horne Tooke's Act, were open to dispute. The earliest was that of Newell, who was returned from a Cornish borough in 1553, but was ejected from the house, "because he had a voice in Convoca

14

tion." The decision seems to indicate no more than the fact, that it was against the custom of Parliament for the same person to have a seat in both Houses. But the decision in the case of Christopher Parkins, dean of Carlisle, points the other way. This person, who, held the deanery from 1595 to 1622, certainly had a voice in Convocation, but he held his seat unchallenged. He was not, it appears, in orders, or at least not in priest's orders, since he had a dispensation from Elizabeth, by which he was suffered to retain his deanery notwithstanding his want of a clerical qualification. The case of Dr. or Sir Joseph Craddock is less equivocal. He was returned to the Parliament of 1661, for Richmond, is mentioned in the journals as having obtained sick leave from the House in May, and is declared incapable of sitting in the following January. Craddock was unseated on petition. One Wandesford claimed the seat, objecting that Craddock was in holy orders, and was not returned by the majority of suffrages. The matter was referred to the Committee of Privileges, both objections were sustained, and Wandesford's name was substituted in the return for that of Craddock. The fourth case was more recent. Edward Rushworth had been returned for Newport, Isle of Wight. He had been admitted to deacon's orders, and had served a curacy. It does not appear that he had taken priest's orders. His opponent, John Barrington, who petitioned against Rushworth's return, had warned the electors of Newport that his rival was ineligible, and that their votes would be thrown away. On considering the petition, the committee appointed for the purpose gave no opinion on the subject of Rushworth's eligibility, other than a report that he was duly elected. This decision was given in February 1785. But though these cases only are alluded to in the report presented to the House in 1801, it was well enough known, and never disputed, that many persons had, from time to time, sat in Parliament, who were, if the case of Craddock is to be taken as conclusive, disabled from fulfilling this function.

Between the time, however, in which Craddock's return was declared void, and

the question was revived in the case of Rushworth, a great change had taken place in the constitutional position of the clergy. By some arrangement, the particulars of which are not very clear, Convocation, shortly after the Restoration, gave up the practice of voting supplies. The privilege was not worth contending for. It had long since been ruled that the grants of the clergy in Convocation had no legal validity, unless they were subsequently sanctioned or endorsed by Parliament. All that remained to Convocation was a formal and barren initiative. Thenceforward, and as it seems tacitly, ecclesiastical were treated as lay fees. The incumbents of freehold benefices were empowered, whether they were clergy or lay persons, to vote for members of Parliament, and were subjected to the same imposts in respect of their benefices as they had been liable to in respect of their lay possessions. Before this arrangement was made, there was some color for the exclusion of the clergy, though there is abundant evidence that the disqualification was either not contemplated or was disregarded. But afterwards, if we can trust the uncontradicted statements of many persons, the House of Commons was and had been indisposed to invalidate the return of a clergyman, even in case a petition were presented, and would certainly not be inclined to raise the question on abstract grounds.

But the case was very different when Horne Tooke was introduced into the House of Commons by Sir Francis Burdett and Mr. Wilson, on February 16, 1801. The presence of no person could have been more offensive to the dominant party. Tooke was now an elderly man. For nearly forty years he had been a prominent and busy politician. He had supported Wilkes in the Middlesex contest. Report said that he had saved the election. He had fought against the scandalous pardon of the Brothers Kennedy. He dictated the famous reply of Alderman Beckford to the King. He founded the society for supporting the Bill of Rights. In his quarrel with Wilkes, he was the assailant of that person's character, not of his opinions. He ran a tilt with Junius. But so much courtesy, considering the character of