sonal character of Cromwell, we express, without reserve, our belief that this extraordinary (as he might with more justice be denominated rather than great) man, as he is unjustly designated, would not be stopt by difficulties to which others would yield-would not be deterred, by any delicacy of moral feeling, from virtually pledging himself to the truth of a declaration, every line of which he knew was traced with the characters of falsehood and injustice. 66 In Burnett's refutation of the lies and calumnies of that open and decided enemy to the protestant cause, the noted Roman Catholic writer Sanders, there is one instance in reference to Fisher which, it must be fairly admitted, places the Bishop on the wrong, and Sanders on the right side in their respective statements. "The Bishop of Rochester," says Sanders, was condemned because he would not acknowledge the king's supremacy." Burnett's reply is, "He was never pressed to acknowledge it."* During Fisher's confinement in the Tower, which was altogether for fourteen months, and where his treatment was such as to make the poor remnant of his life as wretchedt as it could be, from the want of clothes and fire, he was visited several times by the lords of the council. In the interval between their first and second visit, there had been the session of parliament of the 26th of Henry VIII., in which was passed the celebrated statute that conferred upon Henry the title of the supreme head of the church, and which made words, contrary to all constitutional forms, treason. Upon their second visit we are expressly told the lords of the council went to know his opinion touching the statute of supreme head. So much for Burnett's declaration that he was never pressed to acknowledge it. Fisher, however, with all his straight-forwardness and conscientiousness of purpose, was so wary and unconfiding in his answer to their interrogatories, in the full conviction that they were put to entrap and criminate him, that the lords could draw no other reply than thisthat "the statute did not compel any man to answer; he, therefore, besought that he should not be constrained to make farther or other answer than the statute did bind him to make." He was again examined by the council for a third time. But though, on all these occasions, he still declined offering any opinion on the supremacy, lest he might fall into the danger of the statutes, never * History of the Reform., v. i., par. ii, p. 438. + Burnett himself does acknowledge that "the old Bishop was hardly used."—History of the Reform., v. i., p. 318. See Bruce, p. 80-83; Lord Herbert, p. 392; and Roper's Appendix, Letters xi. and xii. VOL. VI.NO. XIX. theless the council, to gratify the eager, watchful vengeance of his royal persecutor, were even willing to travel beyond the sphere of action into thought, with which no human judgment has concern, of which no human observation can take cognizance; as they sought to interpret his very avoidance of uttering any opinion whatever respecting the supremacy into a flat denial of it. In this exigency, to find matter of impeachment against their prisoner, Rich, the then Solicitor General, a man who had a genius for lying, and who has acquired an infamous celebrity in history, as the betrayer of More and Fisher, at last succeeded in inveigling him into a denial of the supremacy; for by this abandoned tool of the court, he is charged with having said, "before divers persons, that the king is not supreme head of the church," which accusation, in the cunning verbosity of the statute of 26 Henry VIII., cap. 13, is thus put forth, "that the prisoner falsely, maliciously, and traiterously wished, willed, devised, and by craft imagined, invented, practised, and attempted to deprive the king of the dignity, title, and name of the supreme head of the church." But though theory and practice were both alike against the act of parliament upon which this indictment was principally founded, inasmuch as it obliterated all distinctions between right and wrong in the understanding, which might naturally enough be expected, when the parliament was willing to become the mere instrument* of sanctioning the most arbitrary measures of the king; yet can the historian of the Reformation resort to the petty-fogging arguments and artifices of legal chicanery+ for the justification of proceedings that his, in other respects, sound and pure mind would have taught him to regard as specimens of a sanguinary era, and which memorials of frightful injustice even then might not have been furnished to the philosophical investigation of this age, if the judges who sentenced Fisher had not been the willing delegates of the vindictive and * “ There is not,” as Madame de Staël observes, “a better instrument of tyranny than an assembly when it is degraded."—Considerations on the French Revolution, English translation, v. iii., p. 178. + See History of the Reform., v. i., par. ii, p. 438. Some have mounted the scaffold with so fixed a determination to astonish their beholders by a display of their heroism, that they died, as it were, with a sort of scenic effect. But Fisher's death was simply great, and therefore truly christian. It is so well given by a protestant divine, that we shall not abridge his narration:" On the morning of his execution he dressed himself with unusual care, saying that he was preparing to be a bridegroom. As he was conducted to the place of execution, being impeded by the pressure of the crowd, with his New Testament in his hand, he prayed to this effect : iron despotism so discernible throughout the whole of Henry's reign.* M. R. S. L. THE DOCTOR. If the permanence of our first impressions be sometimes an evil, thereby perpetuating the errors of infancy from the child to the father, from the father to the child, until sin and sorrow grow into an hereditary doom, yet how much of happiness do we owe to the lastingness of first impressions, belonging to a period of sinlessness and innocence when the tender affections were expanded like the opening petal to every beam of light and brightness-impressions that, as the sacred volume had been the companion and solace of his imprisonment, he might open on some passage which might strengthen him in his last conflict. Having thus prayed, he opened the book-let not the Christian say fortuitously-and his eyes rested on the following passage of Saint John:This is life eternal, to know thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent.' He again closed the book with joy, and the consolatory declaration was the subject of his meditations, until his mortal existence was terminated by the hand of the executioner."-Carwithen's History of the Church of England, v. i., p. 143–144. * In the subsequent reigns of the first James and the first Charles, this revolting spectacle of the judges bowing to the supremacy of the power of the crown, instead of presenting themselves as ramparts against the excesses of political tyranny, and so protecting the subject from the most odious of all wrongs, the most vexatious of all injustice, has been strongly pointed out by Clarendon. The very spirit of the English constitution seems to speak in him, when he says, "The damage and mischief cannot be expressed that the crown and state sustained by the undeserved reproach and infamy that attended the judges by being made use of in acts of power. In the wisdom of former times, when the prerogative went highest, never any court of law, very seldom any judge or lawyer of reputation, was called upon to assist in any act of power. The crown well knowing the moment of keeping those the objects of reverence and veneration with the people, and that, though it might sometimes make sallies upon them by the prerogative, yet the law would keep the people from any invasion of it; and that the king could never suffer whilst the law and the judges were looked upon by the subject as the asylum for their liberties and security."-History of the Rebellion, book i. which fell unresisted by our weakness, bound together by memory, the nurse of all that is dear to the heart. From our first impressions springs the poetry of our natures, when in hardened manhood we look back upon the softened dream of infancy and its thousand prattles, of home, and all of home, of love, and light, and joy-every fluttering feeling, every fond association, full of mother's love, possessing us with those delicious sensibilities which arise from the heart, like the dew-drops exhaling into fragrance. Mother!-O! there is such a fullness of love in that word, a thousand, thousand fond looks fall on one, a thousand kisses warm, a thousand fond expressions sound again. Father, sister, wife, are void of that utter giving up of self which speaks in mother. We think of her who through infancy preserved us, through boyhood delighted us, through life loved us-who watched every breath, and by her scarce articulate prayer and heaven-turned eye, beaming with its own goodness, taught us all of God—that he is love; "first impressions" that in after years appear shining in the unclosed sanctuary of the heart. "Tis thus to be a boy again. The past forms the poetry of the future; we foretell the events of unborn hours by the recognitions of olden times, we behold in the expansion of present delights, the golden fruition of young desires. fears, our hopes spring from those of childhood-our prejudices, our passions, had their germ in infancy. "The past is poetry! The deeds, the days, As od'rous flowers to frame a wreath of song." The terrors of darkness and the realm of ancient night, peopled with shades, arise from the incomprehensible fears of childhood naturally connecting danger with dependence. For the same reason does the reverence which mankind insensibly render to authorities and powers owe its existence to the first impressions in the infant mind, when, like the savage, we behold authority in its display, and shrink less from the man than from the dazzling splendour which surrounds him. The king's crown, the lawyer's robe, the priest's cassock, the doctor's sables and gold-headed cane, seem consubstantiated with their being. Our first impressions seem to be sometimes hereditary, handed down from father to father as one of the incorporated elements of the body. When began the dread with which the name, the person, of the Doctor is beheld? To the little child there is something fearful, ghost-like, in the sound of Doctor. It is not a mere antipathy to the jam powder; there is a hobgoblinish sound in the word Doctor which makes him ever after an object of alarm and dread. We do not mean to include in this title all those ycleped Doctors, from the pig-killer to the apothecary,— "Who in the catalogue go for Doctors, As hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, but those solemn students and grave masters—the lineal descendants of the ancient "leech”—who hold no intercommunion with the world at large but through the "art and mystery" of their calling. Hark! the Doctor! What terror there is in every look, what flying to and fro to escape the glance of the evil eye as he walks up the stairs; one, two, three, four, for a true-bred Doctor would sooner swallow his fee than mount two steps at once-five, six: the door opens, and the pale, emaciated, trembling brother, or shrinking sister, droops before the bald-headed Mephistophiles, whose very shake of the hand seems supernatural and belonging to another world. Then the poor patient, her eye restless, her cheek flushed, her breathings short, the very pulse quickened, as he softly intrudes his wan features between the falling white curtains of the bed—the "How do you do? how do you do?" in tones pianissimo, sliding down into a mere breathing aspiration-then the solemn touch of his cold, white, long-fingered hand, the loud tick, tick, tick, of his watch, with the dead, solemn moment of pulse feeling—the ah! as if talking to his own ghost. The Doctor is a fearful man! Different from every other created being, every thing conspires to transform him into a nature neither of life nor death. The Doctor's education works well; the constant features of death, the ceaseless wail of pain and anguish, the affliction of weeping friends -all this works well; but, more than all, the first fears of infancy and childhood, and the superstitious dread which trafficking with death creates, work all to throw around the Doctor an aspect peculiar and impressive. But this dread is one of those "impressions" which may be said with us to have had no first, but arose with the existence of human suffering, even long anterior to Machaon or Esculapius; medicine and magic came from the same womb, and thus |