Spain; and, believing that it was the real cause, she had offered to hear and to respect their objections. Their leader had betrayed in his answer his true motives; he had demanded possession of the Tower of London and of her own person. She stood there, she said, as lawful Queen of England, and she appealed to the loyalty of her great city to save her from a presumptuous rebel, who, under specious pretences, intended to 'subdue the laws to his will, and to give scope to rascals and forlorn persons to make general havoc and spoil.' As to her marriage, she had supposed that so magnificent an alliance could not have failed to be agreeable to her people. To herself, and, she was not afraid to say, to her council, it seemed to promise high advantage to the commonwealth. Marriage, in itself, was indifferent to her; she had been invited to think of it by the desire of the country that she should have an heir; but she could continue happily in the virgin state in which she had hitherto passed her life. She would call a parliament, and the subject should be considered in all its bearings; if, on mature consideration, the Lords and Commons of England should refuse to approve of the Prince of Spain as a fitting husband for her, she promised, on the word of a queen, that she would think of him no

more.

"The spectacle of her distress won the sympathy of her audience; the boldness of her bearing commanded their respect; the promise of a parliament satisfied, or seemed to satisfy, all reasonable demands: and among the wealthy citizens there was no desire to see London in possession of an armed mob, in whom the Anabaptist leaven was deeply interfused. The speech, therefore, had remarkable success. The queen returned to Westminster, leaving the corporation converted to the prudence of supporting her. Twenty-five thousand men were enrolled the next day for the protection of the crown and the capital; Lord William Howard was associated with the mayor in the command; and Wyatt, who had reached Greenwich on Thursday, and had wasted two days there, uncertain whether he should not cross the river in boats to Blackwall, arrived on Saturday morning at Southwark, to find the gates closed on London Bridge, and the drawbridge flung down into the water."

As I have no excuse for indulging in the narratives of the deaths in Oxford or at Smithfield, I will take the conclusion of the whole matter.

"This was the 14th of November. The same day, or the day after, a lady-in-waiting carried the queen's last wishes to her successor. They were the same which she had already mentioned to De Feria-that her debts should be paid, and that the Catholic

tional request that her servants should be properly cared for. Then, taking leave of a world in which she had played so ill a part, she prepared, with quiet piety, for the end. On the 16th, at midnight, she received the last rites of the Church. Towards morning, as she was sinking, mass was said at her bedside. At the elevation of the Host, unable to speak or move, she fixed her eyes upon the body of her Lord; and as the last words of the benediction were uttered, her head sunk, and she was gone.

"A few hours later, at Lambeth, Pole followed her, and the reign of the Pope in England, and the reign of terror, closed together.

"No English sovereign ever ascended the throne with larger popularity than Mary Tudor. The country was eager to atone to her for her mother's injuries; and the instinctive loyalty of the English towards their natural sovereign was enhanced by the abortive efforts of Northumberland to rob her of her inheritance. She had reigned little more than five years, and she descended into the grave amidst curses deeper than the acclamations which had welcomed her accession. In that brief time she had swathed her name in the horrid epithet which will cling to it for ever; and yet from the passions which in general tempt sovereigns into crime, she was entirely free; to the time of her accession she had lived a blameless, and, in many respects, a noble life; and few men or women have lived less capable of doing knowingly a wrong thing.

can

Philip's conduet, which could not extinguish her passion for him, and the collapse of the inflated imaginations which had surrounded her supposed pregnancy, it hardly be doubted affected her sanity. Those forlorn hours when she would sit on the ground with her knees drawn to her face; those restless days and nights when, like a ghost, she would wander about the palace galleries, rousing herself only to write tearblotted letters to her husband; those bursts of fury over the libels dropped in her way; or the marchings in procession behind the Host in the London streets-these are all symptoms of hysterical derangement, and leave little room, as we think of her, for other feelings than pity. But if Mary was insane, the madness was of a kind which placed her absolutely under her spiritual directors; and the responsibility for her cruelties, if responsibility be anything but a name, rests first with Gardiner, who commenced them, and, secondly, and in a higher degree, with Reginald Pole. Because Pole, with the council, once interfered to prevent an imprudent massacre in Smithfield; because, being legate, he left the common duties of his diocese to subordinates; he is not to be held innocent of atrocities which could neither have been commenced nor con tinued without his sanction; and he was no

the queen absolutely trusted. The revenge of the clergy for their past humiliations, and the too natural tendency of an oppressed party to abuse suddenly recovered power, combined to originate the Marian persecution. The rebellions and massacres, the political scandals, the universal suffering throughout the country during Edward's minority, had created a general bitterness in all classes against the Reformers; the Catholics could appeal with justice to the apparent consequences of heretical opinions; and when the Reforming preachers themselves denounced so loudly the irreligion which had attended their success, there was little wonder that the world took them at their word, and was ready to permit the use of strong suppressive measures to keep down the unruly tendencies of uncontrolled fanatics.

"But neither these nor any other feelings of English growth, could have produced the scenes which have stamped this unhappy reign with a character so frightful. The parliament which re-enacted the Lollard statutes, had refused to restore the Six Articles as being too severe; yet under the Six Articles twenty-one persons only suffered in six years; while, perhaps, not twice as many more had been executed under the earlier acts in the century and a half in which they had stood on the Statute roll. The harshness of the law confined the action of it to men who were definitely dangerous; and when the bishops' powers were given back to them, there was little anticipation of the manner in which those powers would be misused.

"And that except from some special influences they would not have been thus misused, the local character of the prosecution may be taken to prove. The storm was violent only in London, in Essex which was in the diocese of London, and in Canterbury. It raged long after the death of Gardiner; and Gardiner, though he made the beginning, ceased after the first few months to take further part in it. The Bishop of Winchester would have had a persecution, and a keen one; but the fervour of others left his lagging zeal far behind. For the first and last time the true Ultramontane spirit was dominant in England-the genuine conviction that, as the orthodox prophets and sovereigns of Israel slew the worshippers of Baal, so were Catholic rulers called upon, as their first duty, to extirpate heretics as the enemies of God and man.

"The language of the legate to the City of London shows the devout sincerity with which he held that opinion himself. Through him, and sustained by his authority, the queen held it; and by these two the ecclesiastical government of England was conducted.

Archbishop Parker, who knew Pole and Pole's doings well, called him Carnifex et flagellum Ecclesiæ Anglicana, the hangman and the scourge of the Church of England. His character was irreproachable; in all the virtues of the Catholic Church he walked without spot or stain; and the system to which he had sur

rendered himself had left to him of the common selfishnesses of mankind his enormous vanity alone. But that system had extinguished also in him the human instincts, the genial emotions by which theological theories stand especially in need to be corrected. He belonged to a class of persons at all times numerous, in whom enthusiasm takes the place of understanding; who are men of an 'idea;' and unable to accept human things as they are, are passionate loyalists, passionate churchmen, passionate revolutionists, as the accidents of their age may determine. Happily for the welfare of mankind, persons so constituted rarely arrive at power; should power come to them, they use it, as Pole used it, to defeat the ends which are nearest to their hearts.

"The teachers who finally converted the English nation to Protestantism were not the declaimers from the pulpit, nor the voluminous controversialists with the pen. These, indeed, could produce arguments which, to those who were already convinced, seemed as if they ought to produce conviction; but conviction did not follow till the fruits of the doctrine bore witness to the spirit from which it came. The evangelical teachers, caring only to be allowed to develope their own opinions, and persecute their opponents, had walked hand in hand with men who had spared neither tomb nor altar, who had stripped the lead from the church roofs, and stolen the bells from the church towers; and between them they had so outraged such plain honest minds as remained in England, that had Mary been content with mild repression, had she left the Pope to those who loved him, and had married, instead of Philip, some English lord, the mass would have retained its place, the clergy in moderate form would have resumed their old authority, and the Reformation would have waited for a century. In an evil hour, the queen listened to the unwise advisers, who told her that moderation in religion was the sin of the Laodiceans; and while the fanatics who had brought scandal on the Reforming cause, either truckled, like Shaxton, or stole abroad to wrangle over surplices and forms of prayer, the true and the good atoned with their lives for the crimes of others, and vindicated a noble cause by nobly dying for it.

"And while among the Reformers that which was most bright and excellent shone out with preternatural lustre, so were the Catholics permitted to exhibit also the preternatural features of the creed which was ex piring.

"Although Pole and Mary could have laid their hands on earl and baron, knight and gentleman, whose heresy was notorious, although, in the queen's own guard, there were many who never listened to a mass, they durst not strike where there was danger that they would be struck in return. They went out into the highways and hedges; they

gathered up the lame, the halt, and the blind; they took the weaver from his loom, the carpenter from his workshop, the husbandman from his plough; they laid hands on maidens and boys who had never heard of any other religion than that which they were called on to abjure;' old men tottering into the grave; and children whose lips could but just lisp the articles of their creed; and of these they made their burnt-offerings; with these they crowded their prisons, and when filth and famine killed them, they flung them out to rot. How long England would have endured the repetition of the horrid spectacles is hard to say. The persecution lasted three years, and in that time something less than 300 persons were burnt at the stake. By imprisonment,' said Lord Burleigh, 'by torment, by fainine, by fire, almost the number of 400 were,' in their various ways, ' lamentably destroyed.'

"Yet, as I have already said, interference was impossible except by armed force. The country knew from the first that by the course of nature the period of cruelty must be a brief one; it knew that a successful rebellion is at best a calamity; and the bravest and wisest men would not injure an illustrious cause by conduct less than worthy of it, so long as endurance was possible. They had saved Elizabeth's life and Elizabeth's rights; and Elizabeth, when her time came, would deliver her subjects. The Catholics, therefore, were permitted to continue their cruelties till the cup of iniquity was full; till they had taught the educated laity of England to regard them with horror; and until the Romanist superstition had died, amidst the execrations of the people, of its own excess."

Some will say that Pole is hardly treated here and elsewhere in these volumes. If Mr. Froude's statements respecting him can be refuted, Englishmen may recover that estimate of him which they have derived from the older historians. But I cannot feel that the character is inconsistent with itself, or that Mr. Froude is wrong in giving, as he certainly does, the preference to Gardiner as being more of an English statesman, and not a worse Churchman. I should be more inclined to dispute Mr. Froude's judgment of Paget. That he should feel a real respect for a man who was not only keen-sighted, and in the main just, but who anticipated the modern opinions respecting persecution, is not

wonderful. Mr. Froude has earned a right to express a little over-sympathy with a Latitudinarian, by his cordial appreciation of men of an opposite type of character. But I cannot discover that the Pagets, the Halifaxes, and the trimmers of the sixteenth or the seventeenth centuries, really did anything to secure that their convictions-if convictions they are to be called-should be the inheritance of the ages that were to succeed them. They were wise for themselves. They scorned much that was worthy of scorn, but they could not make their scorn effective for the cure of it. They despised persecutors; they did not seriously curse persecution. When a man was disagreeably pertinacious in his opinions, they were so tolerant of others that they found it quite justifiable to be intolerant of him. They thought it very absurd to kill for a faith, but they thought it quite as absurd to die for one. And this alone has made persecution impossible in any country or any age, this only will make it impossible in all countries and in all ages: that it has been established by a series of demonstrations, some of which Mr. Froude has beautifully recorded, that he who kills for a faith must be weak, that he who dies for a faith must be strong.1

1 Do I mean to endorse the pious fraud that the persecutor always fails of his immediate object, and strengthens the cause which he desires to crush? Certainly not. The impotency of his material force in the spiritual battle is established by other evidence than that. His success is his defeat. He cannot deprive his victims of their faith. Unless he is saved by becoming a sufferer, he loses his own. Unless his country is saved by similar suffering, it ceases to believe when it is reduced into acquiescence. This is the persecutor's curse; thus the divine law is vindicated. I do not say that the remark can be applied strictly to any persecutions except those which Christians have set on foot against each other and against infidels. If the Cross is not the sign and the power of conquest, there is no manifest direct contradiction in trying to conquer for a faith by inflicting punishment instead of bearing it.

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THOSE who have read the "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater"-and few of us have not-will recollect in the earlier part of that remarkable volume the author's description of the manner in which he was wont to spend " opium evening" in his youth. Under the peculiar influence exerted by that marvellous drug, in a frame of mind disposed to quiet contemplation and sentimental entertainment, but wholly averse from laborious thought or keen excitement, he was wont to seek amusement and interest in a stroll among the unfashionable marts of London: to watch the working man in his commercial dealings, the working woman in her humble round of weekly shopping; to hear their talk and gather their thoughts upon their lot in life, upon the things and persons that surround them, during the few gas-light hours in which it is their practice to purchase wherewithal to feed and clothe and warm themselves and their children, as best they may, during the seven days that are to follow. And such a walk,-though it lie not exactly through neighbourhoods as quiet and pleasant as Kensington Gardens, or streets and squares as fair to look upon as those of Belgravia and Mayfair; though the localities through which it may lead us are not always clean, and are too often both unsightly and unsavoury, offending our senses in no trivial degree, yet has its picturesque and interesting aspect. Humanity cannot well fail of picturesque effect, wherever it has to wage a hard and earnest struggle, however ugly and illbuilt the dwellings it haunts, however squalid the rags which are its only uniform, in the Battle of Life.

The crowded market in a by-way, lighted by flaring jets of gas in double rows, and crammed with purchasers so

seem hardly possible to reach the stalls at its further end in time to effect a purchase the little shops which are making an effort at unusual display in order to attract purchasers who are not likely to scrutinize very closely the texture of that showy dress which is marked at a figure so surprisingly low, and who will be too hurried to notice that yonder cheap and elegant" coat and vest are got up to sell and not to wear;-the shopkeepers and stallkeepers who stand at their doors or at the side of their handcarts, keeping up a continual confused bawl, which, if attentively analysed, seems to run-"Only a penny, gentlemen, only a penny! no better in London, marm, twopence half-penny a pound-only twopence ha'penny-fine bacon-now then! buy! buy! buy!"and the eager, hurried throng of jostling purchasers, glancing at everything, coveting everything, buying at last that which is most pressed upon them; with here and there some quiet knowing ones among them, who have set their hearts on some special adornment for the wife's bonnet, or some new delicacy for the husband's Sunday dinner, and are not to be tempted aside by the noisy offers which beset them on all hands-all these things compose a scene which is worth notice, and which, at first sight, is amusing and not unpleasing to behold.

If, however, we walk in among the crowd of sellers and buyers, and look a little more closely than do the latter at the articles offered to their selection; above all, if we do so not when noise and business have reached their highest point, but before the thickest press has commenced, and before, at this season, the daylight has departed from those huge screens of joints of unwholesomelooking meat which veil one shop, and the piles of withered peas which are

we shall presently obtain a glimpse of the underside of the matter which is more instructive than agreeable. We shall then see at what disadvantage stands the shopping which is done by gaslight, amid the confusion of incessant noise and the hurry of impatient customers. That beef, for instance, is not such as a good housewife would think of buying; much of the bacon yonder is of a kind that Do-the-boys Hall would be ashamed of; and the smell of the mackerel exposed on the fish-stall in the corner is so objectionable, that it makes itself felt even amid the innumerable odours of this unsavoury place, and compels us to form a decided opinion as to the fitness of the fishmonger's wares for human food. Those shoes, too, look very much as if they were the unsaleable refuse of some more fashionable locality especially those dedicated to the "ladies." Of those which seem fit for working men, the more serviceable were possibly bought from some government establishment as "old stores," at a fourth of the price that will to-night be asked for them. And so on throughout. Everything except, of course, the prices-is third-rate at best, and often merely worthless. The customers must go home ill-shod, ill-fed, unfitly clothed, and must dine to-morrow on meat decidedly "high," and fish unmistakeably odorous; and all this not because they cannot afford to pay for proper food and clothing, but because all their purchases are made at once, by gaslight, in a crowd and in a hurry; because they are in the hands of itinerant stallkeepers, and shopkeepers of scarcely higher character; and because too many of them come to their purchases not from home, but from the public-house, with heads not of the clearest, and with pockets a little less heavy than they were three or four hours ago.

To many of the small dealers in such localities Saturday night is worth as much as the rest of the week altogether; many of them take more between six and twelve on Saturday night than between Monday morning and Saturday

more regular daily business than his neighbours, who tells us that his receipts during those six hours are equal to those of any other three days in the week. And outside the baker's door is a man with a small hand-cart, on which are piles of starved cherries, sour apples, and half-ripe gooseberries. He never comes there except on Saturday night, and he pays the baker four shillings a week for leave to stand there on the little strip of pavement which, as private property, is exempt from clearance by the police. He can afford to pay out of six hours' profit on his wretched stock a rent of four shillings for the square yard of ground he stands on. There are plenty of lads and lasses released to-night from their week's toil with a few shillings in their pockets and a taste for fruit rather comprehensive than choice, who will amply remunerate him for his outlay. Next to his stands the barrow of a woman who sells penny bottles of something which she calls ginger-beer, but to which I should hesitate to assign a name. She stands there every day; but she, too, would have a poor living of it were it not for Saturday night, when the man who has seventeen or twenty shillings in his pocket thinks less of a penny than he will do by Thursday or Friday next. And those immense heaps of peas which on a summer Saturday night are piled over half the green-grocer's disposable space, would hardly find purchasers on any other evening. One evening of business at high profits pays the dealer in the poor man's market for a week of slack trade and scanty gains. From six hours' profits does he get his living, and those profits must come from the scanty resources of families in which the breadwinner earns from fifteen to thirty-five shillings a week.

Very different is the case of the westend; very striking the contrast between Saturday night in western shops and in Whitechapel markets, between the Saturday of the rich and the Saturday of the poor.

Were this only one of the manifold instances in which by mere force of