Canterbury cathedral, and died in that city in 1563. He was a voluminous writer, his best known work being his "Summary of the Illustrious Writers of Great Britain," of which Strype speaks with high praise. Of more interest to us is this strange glimpse of the state of Ireland in his day.

Mr. Froude, in the preliminary chapter to his "History of the English in Ireland," referring to the times of King Edward the Sixth, says that attempts were made to introduce and force upon the people the doctrinal theories for which even England was unprepared.

"Unconsecrated prelates were thrust into the Irish sees under the naked authority of letters patent. John Bale, the most virulent and the most profane of the unfortunate party whose excesses provoked the counter-reformation, commenced work as Bishop of Ossory, which would have led, under ordinary circumstances, to an instant explosion."

By the Rev. Mr. Carr, editor of the Irish Ecclesiastical Gazette," and others, the error of Mr. Froude in calling John Bale "an unconsecrated prelate," has been clearly shown, the dates and circumstances of his consecration being supplied. As to his "profanity," the following passages from "Strype's Annals" give sufficient explanation: "Bale, who though he is sometimes blamed, and blameworthy indeed, for his rude and plain language, is an author of high esteem, and of commendable diligence and integrity." And again, "I use the words of John Bale, who would call a spade a spade." And in another place Strype says, "There were now published two books by John Bale, whereat Winchester (Gardiner) was highly enraged, calling them pernicious, seditious, and slanderous. Bale's pen indeed was sharp and foul enough sometimes, when he had such foul subjects to deal with as the cruelties and uncleannesses of many of the popish priests, and prelates, and cloisterers."

Sonnets of the Sacred Hear.

BY THE REV. S. J. STONE, M.A.

SIXTEENTH SUNDAY AFTER TRINITY. "And when the Lord saw her, He had compassion on her, and said unto her, Weep not."-St. Luke vii. 13.

EEP not."

Varieties.

COAL AND FUEL IN LONDON IN THE SEVENTEENTH CEN The Londoners, in especial, deprived of their coal from NewTURY. It was an unusually severe winter, cold and snowy. castle, felt it severely. Baillie particularly mentions the comfortable hangings of the Jerusalem Chamber, and the good fire kept burning in it, as "some dainties in London" at that date, and duly appreciated by the members of the Assembly. Among the printed broadsheets of the time that were hawked about London, I have seen one entitled "Artificial Fire; or, Coal for vention." The invention consists of a proposal to the Londoners of a cheap substitute for coal, devised by a "Mr. Richard Gesling, Ingineer, late deceased." Mr. Gesling's idea was that, if you take brickdust, mortar, sawdust, or the like, and make up paste-balls thereof mingled with the dust of sea-coal or Scotch coal, and with stable-litter, you will have a fuel much more economical than coal itself. But, though this is the practical proposal of the fly-sheet, its main interest lies in its lamentation over the lack of the normal fuel. "Some finenosed city dames," it says, "used to tell their husbands, 'O husband we shall never be well, we nor our children, whilst we live in the smell of this city's sea-coal smoke! Pray, a country-house for our health, that we may get out of this seacoal smell! But how many of these fine-nosed dames now cry, Would to God we had sea-coal! Oh! the want of fire undoes us! O the sweet sea-coal fires we used to have! how we wan want them now! no fire to your sea-coal!'. . . This for the rich a word for the poor! The great want of fuel for fire makes many a poor creature cast about how to pass over this cold winter to come; but, finding small redress for so cruel an enemy as the cold makes, some turn thieves that never stole before-steal posts, seats, benches from doors, rails, nay, the very stocks that should punish them; and all to keep the cold winter away."-Masson's Life of Milton, vol. iii., p. 36.

Rich and Poor: this being the offer of an excellent new In

ANCESTORS AND RELATIONS.-Judge Blackstone, in his "Commentaries," says: "Few people are aware how wealthy they are in the number of their relations. It is at the first view astonishing to consider the number of lineal ancestors which every man has within no very great number of degrees; and so many different bloods is a man said to contain as he hath lineal ancestors. Of these he hath two in the first ascending degree, his own parents; he hath four in the second, the parents of his father and the parents of his mother; he hath eight in the third, the parents of his two grandfathers and two grandmothers; and by the same rule of progression he hath an hundred and twenty-eight in the seventh; a thousand and twenty-four in the tenth; and at the twentieth degree, or at the distance of twenty generations, every man hath above a million of ancestors, as common arithmetic will demonstrate." The number of collateral relations a man has, each descended from an ancestor only twenty generations back, is next to im. possible to calculate, and quite overwhelming to imagine.

SHAKESPEARE AND MILTON COMMEMORATED.-In the year 1769, Garrick took the lead in preparing a rural festival in honour of Shakespeare, at his native town at Stratford-on-Avon. Cowper, in the """ Task," gives some account of this affair, but in no very complimentary style. But there were absurdities

hills,

milliner sold gaudy ribbons under the motto:

"Each change of many-coloured life he drew." And the prince of fools and best of biographers wore the inscription of "Corsica Boswell" in his hat, lest he should miss an atom of the notoriety which was his chief ambition in life. "For Garrick was a worshipper himself;

He drew the liturgy and framed the rites
And solemn ceremonial of the day,

And called the world to worship on the banks
Of Avon, famed in song,

The mulberry-tree was hung with blooming wreaths; The mulberry-tree stood centre of the dance; The mulberry-tree was hymned with dulcet airs. So 'twas a hallowed time; decorum reigned, And mirth without offence. No few returned Doubtless much edified, and all refreshed." Sir William Jones, afterwards judge in India, was prevented from attending this jubilee. "But I was resolved," he afterwards said, in a letter preserved by Lord Teignmouth, "to do all the honour in my power to as great a poet, and set out in the morning, in company with a friend, to visit a place where Milton spent some part of his life, and where, in all probability, he composed several of his earliest produc tions. It is a small village situated on a pleasant hill about

Meadows trim with daisies pied,
Shallow brooks and rivers wide.
Some time walking not unseen,

By hedge-row elms and hillocks green.
While the ploughman near at hand,
Whistles o'er the furrowed land,
And the milkmaid singeth blithe,
And the mower whets his scythe,
And every shepherd tells his tale,
Under the hawthorn in the dale.

It was neither the proper season of the year nor time of the day to hear all the rural sounds, and see all the objects mentioned in this description; but by a pleasing concurrence of circumstances, we were saluted upon our approach to the village with the music of the mower and his scythe; we saw the ploughman intent upon his labours, and the milkmaid returning from her country employment. The poet's house is close to the church. The greatest part of it has been pulled down, and what remains belongs to an adjacent farm. I am informed that several papers in Milton's own hand were found by the gentleman who was last in possession of the estate. The tradition of his having lived there is current among the villagers; one of them showed us a ruinous wall that made part of his chamber, and I was much pleased with another, who had forgotten the name of Milton, but recollected him by the title of the Poet. It must not be omitted that the groves near this village are famous for nightingales, which are so elegantly described in the Penseroso. Most of the cottage windows are overgrown with sweetbriars, vines, and honeysuckles; and that Milton's habitation had the same rustic ornament, we may conclude from his description of the lark bidding him good morrow

Through the sweetbriar or the vine, Or the twisted eglantine."

CHANGE.-Some benefit may be received from change of air, some from change of company, and some from mere change of place. It is not easy to grow well in a chamber where one has fong been sick, and where everything seen and every person speaking revives and impresses images of pain. Though it be that no man can run away from himself, he may yet escape from many causes of useless uneasiness. That "the mind is its own place" is the boast of a fallen angel that had learned to lie. External locality has great effects-at least upon all embodied beings. I hope that this little journey will afford me at least some suspense of melancholy.-Dr. Samuel Johnson's Letters.

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POTATOES FROM TWO POINTS OF VIEW.-William Cobbett had a mortal aversion to potatoes. In his "Rural Rides" he often declaims against them. Speaking of the crops in the Vale of the Avon, he says: "I do not perceive that they have many potatoes, but what they have of this base root seems to look well enough. It was one of the greatest villains upon earth, Sir Walter Raleigh, who, they say, first brought this root into England. He was hanged at last! What a pity, since he was to be hanged, the hanging did not take place before he became such a mischievous devil as he was in the latter twothirds of his life." Mr. Knapp, the genial author of the "Journal of a Naturalist," cannot give enough praise to the potato. He thus closes his panegyric: "Many as are the uses to which this root is applicable-and it will annually be applied to more, if we consider it merely as an article of food, though subject to occasional partial failures, not exempted from the blights (this was before the potato disease appeared), the mildews, the wire-worms, the germinatings of corn, which have often filled our land with wailings and death, we will hail the individual, whoever he might be, who brought it to us, as one of the greatest benefactors to the human race, and with grateful hearts thank the bountiful Giver of all good things for this most extensive blessing."

PROBATE, LEGACY, AND SUCCESSION DUTIES.-The Inland Revenue Returns for the last financial year show that these three taxes on property which is leaving the owner and passing to another, not by sale, but by succession, produced upwards of £5,000,000, but the amount as less by £82,030 than in the preceding year. The probate and (administration) duty, which produced £1,943,206, showed an increase of £90,000. This stamp duty, originally an importation from Holland, is the oldest of these three taxes, and began in 1694, and has not been materially or generally revised or altered since 1815. The legacy duty, which produced £2,146,515 last year, showed a

decline of £204,000. This tax dates from 1780. The youngest of the three taxes, the succession duty, imposed in 1853, produced 826,548 last year, an increase of £31,000. This tax has greatly disappointed expectation. When imposed, eminent Conservative members of Parliament objected that it would reach four millions a year, and even the Inland Revenue Department estimated its product at two millions. In the last financial year legacy duty was paid on sums amounting to £90,997,167 and succession duty on £38,448,370, making together £129,355,537; but neither of these duties is paid on the large amount of property which passes from husband to wife.

NIGHTINGALES.-"Nightingales not only never reach Northumberland and Scotland, but also, as I have been always told, Devonshire and Cornwall. In these two last counties we cannot attribute the failure of them to the want of warmth; the defect in the west is rather a presumptive argument that these birds come over to us from the Continent at the narrowest passage, Thus wrote White of Seland do not stroll so far westward." borne in 1771. Bishop Stanley, of Norwich, repeats the statement as to Devonshire and Cornwall, but does not assent to the popular belief that nightingales are never north of the Trent, as they are at least occasional visitors in northern parts of Yorkshire, as far as Wetherby. In the neighbourhood of Doncaster they have also been heard. In the south and east of England their geographical distribution is very uncertain, the comparative rarity or abundance not unfrequently occurring in spots only a few miles apart. What their favourite food is in the wild state is not ascertained, or this might perhaps give a clue to the apparent caprice in selecting and haunting particular localities.

BENCH AND BAR AT PLAY.-A judge was in the midst of summing up a cause when a donkey began to bray outside the court. The judge stopped short, and there was great silence from the interruption. "Oh !" said a witty but impu dent barrister, "it is only an echo from the yard, my lord." The judge allowed the insult pass, but by-and-by the same animal renewed his noise while the barrister was addressing the court. The judge chuckled at the opportunity of having a droll revenge, and with studious amenity, looking at the barrister, said, Pray, speak only one at a time! "

66

FLORA MACDONALD.-At Kingsburgh I had the honour of saluting the far-famed Miss Flora Macdonald, who conducted the Princess, dressed as her maid, through the English forces from the island of Lewes; and when she came to Skic dined with the English officers, and left her maid below. She must then have been a very young lady; she is not now (1773) old; of a pleasing person and elegant behaviour. She told me she thought herself honoured by my visit, and I am sure that whatever regard she bestowed on me was liberally repaid. “If thou likest her opinion, thou wilt praise her virtue." She was carried to London, but dismissed without a trial, and came down with Malcolm Macleod, against whom sufficient evidence could not be procured. She and her husband are poor, and are going to try their fortune in America. At Kingsburgh we were very liberally feasted, and I slept in the bed on which the Prince reposed in his distress. The sheets which he used were never put to any meaner offices, but were wrapped up by the lady of the house, and at last, according to her desire, were laid round her in her grave. These are not Whigs.-Dr. Johnson's Letters.

CRITICISM BY YOUNG MEN.-The worst thing a young man to the form of nature, is to begin criticising, and cultivating can do, who wishes to educate himself æsthetically, according the barren graces of the net admirari. This maxim may be excusable in a worn-out old cynic, but is intolerable in the mouth of a hopeful young man. There is no good to be looked for from a youth who, having done no substantial work of his own, sets up a business of finding faults in other people's work, and calls this practice of finding fault "criticism." The first lesson that a young man has to learn is not to find fault, but to perceive beauties. All criticism worthy of the name is the ripe fruit of combined intellectual insight and long experience. I have said that the sublime and beautiful in nature and art are the natural and healthy food of the aesthetical faculties. The comical and humorous are useful only in a subsidiary way. It is a great loss to a man when he cannot laugh; but a smile is useful specially in enabling us lightly to shake off the incon gruous, not in teaching us to cherish it. Life is an earnest business, and no man was ever made great or good by a diet of broad grins. The grandest humour, such as that of Aristophanes, is valuable only as the seasoning of the pudding or the spice of the pic. No one feeds on mere pepper or vanilla.— Professor Blackie.

preserve her good looks; she had not the wrinkles of care, nor had she suffered from any of the other ravages with which the wear and tear of ordinary life destroy comeliness, so that casual observers, and those not enlightened as to the domestic annals of the King family, called her a fine woman, and could not see that she had arrived at years when to desire to be called so was very foolish indeed. She had been left with a very large fortune, which ought by rights to have been divided between her and the child of a brother, but which by the influence of Mr. Case had devolved entirely to her.

Mr. Case had a somewhat influential, and certainly a very lucrative post, of an official kind, which of itself brought him a large income; but he was believed besides this to possess a considerable property, and his reputation as a wealthy man had not been the least of his recommendations to Mr. King. All who spoke of Mr. Case unanimously testified to his high place in public esteem; he was powerful by means of his established character for sagacity and integrity; his keenness and the soundness of his judgment were proverbial.

Mr. King, whose death had occurred somewhat suddenly (and prematurely in point of age), had left him sole trustee to his daughter, and as it was to his influence she owed much of her wealth, it was not surprising that of all his clients and admirers she was the most devoted.

Accordingly, she lived by his rule in all business matters, and hardly allowed herself liberty in anything in which she had the happy privilege of asking his advice. She had not the slightest trouble in the management of her estate; by his counsel she limited herself to a certain sum annually, which he paid her, and she permitted him to invest the large surplus in such securities as he thought fit.

Every year when she went through the accounts of her possessions with him, she had the pleasure of seeing them noted down as increased, and poured forth a profusion of grateful praises for his wise and benevolent care of her.

The estate of Callowfields, concerning which her nephew Anthony had raised a question, had been recently made over to a purchaser, on what Mr. Case assured her were highly advantageous terms, and the money had been invested equally to her profit.

Miss King had been brought up under the great disadvantage of thinking entirely of and for herselfit needs very little trouble to bring any one up on this system, so agreeable to nature. As an only daughter, left motherless in infancy, she had been her father's idol, and the pains he took to show it speedily and surely made her her own idol.

She had not any extraordinary natural gifts, far from it; but if she had been better trained she would probably have been an average character, not very wise, not very estimable, not very useful, but not quite so foolish, so unattractive, and so useless, as her engrossing selfishness made her. She was not malicious, revengeful, nor knowingly capable of robbery or wrong, but so warped were her views by the one influence of self, that she serenely, nay, with satisfaction, contemplated the accumulation of her thousands, while her brother's widow pined away and died in obscure want, occasioned by the unjust will of her father in her behalf.

Her nephew Anthony was the only surviving son of her offending brother. From an early age he had

had to struggle with difficulties of a pecuniary kind, for his father had so angered old Mr. King by marrying without his consent a lady whose only dower was her intrinsic worth, that he refused to hold any communication with, or to befriend or countenance him or his children. But for the persuasions of Mr. Caleb Case, this vindictive spirit would have given way during his last illness, and he would have in some degree atoned for his unnatural severity to his son, by making at least a partial provision for him and his family.

an

When, on the death of his parents, Anthony saw himself adrift, as it were, on an unfriendly world, he tried in various ways to obtain a livelihood, and establish himself at least respectably. Although from the circumstances of his childhood and youth he had a very defective education, he had aptitude for learning, and a natural aspiration for high things, that stood him in good stead, making trebly valuable such help as he obtained. He had also a singularly self-reliant character; this was not understood by superficial observers, who mistook an ingenuous preference for what he believed to be better judgment in others in business matters for an absence of all judgment in himself; but on a question of principle he was firm as a rock.

He was real; valued real things, and set little store by those that had not, to him, the ring of true metal; this reality arose from his early knowledge of the Scriptures, on which his views of things and whole character had been formed. He loved "the truth," and the truth made him free from much of the care that seekers after vain hopes are ensnared by. He was no man of business, but that arose from the defects of his training; his good will to work, his transparent sincerity, and his scrupulous integrity, excellent as they were, and well backed with good common sense, were not enough to make him a merchant like his grandfather, or a lawyer like Mr. Caleb Case.

"Go and see your rich aunt, Mr. King," said one friend after another; for he had many well-wishers, though none that were able to help him.

He had not seen his rich aunt since the days of his earliest childhood, and had no more remembrance of her than of any historical character. He did not expect that she would betray any family affection for him; but he saw no reasonable objection to going, so he went.

His visit took Miss King by surprise. His poor circumstances, instead of touching her with compunction, gave her a feeling of shrinking from him, which all his honest, straightforward manner could not remove. She dismissed him with the coldness due to a poor relation, and he left her with a fixed resolve never again to visit her without an invitation.

But Miss King had some misgivings, when he had left her, that she had not acted with wisdom. Although he was poor, he was her nephew; and as all her money and her personal attractions had failed to procure for her those relations which might have given her a direct heir, there was no doubt he, if he survived her, would succeed to the family property. Therefore his respectability was of some importance to her, and she felt a wish that he might maintain it, simply because she saw that her own was somewhat involved in his.

As her custom was, she applied to Mr. Caleb Case for advice, and he strongly urged her not to interfere with him; assuring her that she would certainly

hear of him often enough, without any overture on her part. Mr. Caleb Case wanted no interference in Miss King's affairs, and, as usual, she obeyed him implicitly, and it was very long before her nephew again attempted any intercourse with her. When he did, it was to announce to her that he intended leaving England for he knew not how long, and that he did not like to take his departure without saying farewell to his only living relative.

He had, through the kindly help of Cordell Firebrace, a connection of his mother's and his fast friend, obtained pleasant employment, sufficiently lucrative to enable him to live in as much comfort as he cared for; but having for some time feared, from its precarious nature, that it would fail him, he determined, by the study of the French language, to fit himself for travelling secretary and agent to a gentleman who had, through Cordell's influence, offered him the post.

He had so improved in appearance, and his dress was so much better, that Miss King received him with far more approval than before, and when she heard he was going abroad, her manner became cordial; for she did not doubt, though he gave no clue to his plans, that he was going away with some sure prospect of bettering his condition, and might come back a rich man.

"I am sure, Anthony, I wish you every success. I hope you will not want a friend when you come back" (this she spoke very significantly). "Rich people never want friends, Anthony. Come home a rich man, and you will soon find a welcome everywhere; and remember, 'much gains more'; so all you get will just fit you to succeed to the great King property."

Anthony was too much occupied in speculations on her youthful appearance to say much. Moreover, he was disgusted with her heartless manner and the tone of her remarks; so that he did not press on her an explanation of his true intentions-especially as she seemed to be perfectly satisfied with her own view of them, and to have so set her mind upon it as not to care to be contradicted; so he left her, as he told Mr. Case at his office, under the full impression that he was going to become a Californian or Columbian gold-digger.

His call on Mr. Case was not, however, to enlighten him as to his future, but to make inquiries as to the Callowfields estate, which inquiries had been urged on him by Cordell Firebrace.

The estate of Callowfields, a valuable though small property, Cordell was persuaded from his knowledge of his friend's affairs was not disposable by Mr. or Miss King. It ought to have descended to the old man's son, and to Anthony, his heir, at his death. All Anthony's efforts to persuade him of what seemed to his honest mind as clear as crystalthat Mr. Case could have no interest in wronging him to benefit his aunt, were as ineffectual as waterdrops on marble; but he saw the hopelessness of trying to make Anthony believe what he was convinced was the truth.

"I must fight against him to fight for him," he used to say. "If Mr. Case were a little less of a knave, and Anthony were not so inflexibly honest, it would be an easier business."

Some of his family had for two generations past been engaged in foreign mercantile companies, and the relatives by whom he was connected with Anthony's mother were by birth and residence

Frenchmen. It was from them that he had learned something of the King property, and that a portion of it had certainly been settled on Mr. King's offending son, irrespective of his will and pleasure, and beyond his power to deprive him of it. Zeal for their sister's interest had led them to inquire into these affairs during her life; but after her death their efforts had slackened, and it was not until Cordell, after a long intimacy with Anthony, casually mentioned him as being so shamefully neglected by his rich aunt, that they returned to the subject, and advised him that a small estate undoubtedly belonged to him, which by bequest ought to have been made over to his father when he had attained his majority. Documents were in their hands, which Anthony's mother had become possessed of through her husband, and unless the value of the estate were swallowed up in law expenses, which Mr. Case might oblige them to incur, a fair provision there certainly was for him in it.

"Now, the thing is to make sure before we strike," said Cordell, and to do this he departed from his usual careless, rough and ready way of working, and sought to establish his friend's claim by a chain of evidence of which not a link should be wanting.

There were papers showing that when Mr. King came of age he had demanded to be put in possession of his property, but his death occurring immediately after, the claim had never been enforced, and his widow, sinking under her grief, had consigned the struggle to her relations; and with her decline and death, the question seemed to have been allowed to rest.

Yet it seemed, by the papers in question, that Mr. King had intended Callowfields for his son, and that the title-deeds, if not delivered to him, had been consigned to other hands for his benefit.

Where they lay, if not with Mr. Case, who could divine? Cordell could not; he had worked hard, had greatly tried the patience of his French relatives, and sorely exhausted his own, for the reading of their letters on the subject was a purgatorial work. Suddenly, having heard Anthony speak very highly of the abbé, and not doubting that a master was all he wanted, and that so contemptible a thing as the French language would be learned with very little trouble, he determined to take lessons, instead of any longer spelling out the letters by the help of a dictionary.

He was afraid of trusting to Anthony to translate, as he could not feel sure but that there might be particulars important to conceal from Mr. Case, if, as he suspected, he was acting nefariously in the matter, and he was very sure that gentleman would be able, by management, to get anything out of his candid, single-eyed friend. "I can't trust him," he would say to himself, after debating the question over a letter that had given him a headache.

The sale of Callowfields, of which, though it had been conducted with some secrecy, he had become aware, convinced him that speedy and decisive measures must be taken, and he was strong in hope, that putting French and English together, he should be able to gain the day.

The name of Firebrace was not musical in the ears of Mr. Caleb Case. Cordell's father had been the author of an inquiry into some proceedings of his which he had adroitly contrived to justify, while he seemed to turn the blame on his accusers; but with some it had left a slur on his character, and it had