take off my pall,' thereby implying that his ecclesiastical inferiors could not lawfully deprive him of the mark of his archiepiscopal dignity; but, relying on the powers which they possessed as delegates of the Pope, Bonner and Thirleby took away the lamb's-wool vestment, and completed the ceremony of their primate's degradation. After the bishops had deprived their victim of all his orders, clipped his hair, and 'scraped the tips of his fingers where he had been anointed,' Cranmer, alluding to the pile of vestments that had been taken from his body, observed, 'All this I needed not; I had myself done with this gear long ago.' In place of the gear thus contemptuously mentioned, the dispalled primate received a poor yeomanbeadle's gown, full bare and nearly worn, and as evil favouredly made, as one might lightly see, and a townsman's cap on his head.' Regarding his disfigured and broken foe with malicious exultation Bonner exclaimed,- Now you are no lord any more.' And Bonner spoke the truth. Cranmer was no longer a lord. Henceforth his highest honour was to be one of the Lord's martyrs.

archbishops only, when going into the altar, put about their necks, above their pontifical ornaments. Three mysteries were couched therein. First, humility, which beautifies the clergy above all their costly copes. Secondly, innocency, to imitate lamblike simplicity. And thirdly, industry, to follow Him who fetched His wandering sheep home on His shoulders. But to speak plainly, archbishops receiving it showed therein their dependence on Rome; and a mote in this manner, ceremoniously taken, was a sufficient acknowledgment of their subjection. And, as it owned Rome's power, so in after ages it increased their profit. For though now such palls were freely given to archbishops, whose places in Britain for the present were rather cumbersome than commodious, having little more than their pains for their labour, yet in after ages the Archbishop of Canterbury's pall was sold for five thousand florins: so that the Pope might well have the golden fleece, if he could sell all his lamb's wool at that rate.'

CHAPTER VI.

THE DEATH OF PERSECUTION.

enumerate all the benefits which accrued to our nation and

race from the religious persecutions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries would be a task beyond the province of these volumes; but on closing a superficial survey of repulsive occurrences, which are too apt to rouse in generous and impetuous natures emotions of unreasonable hostility against the church which was mainly responsible for the barbarous outrages, it is desirable that the reader should soothe his agitated feelings by reflecting that the hideous maltreatment of the Lollards and reformers was in various ways fruitful of good to the intellectual and moral life of our forefathers, and that some of its advantageous consequences were of a kind that would justify Protestant Englishmen of the nineteenth century in regarding the malignant persecutors of Lollardy as national benefactors.

The persecutions were fitful and partial,-never raging with unabated fury for any long series of years, and never covering at the same time the entire length and breadth of the land. Even in the dark interval between Edward the Sixth's death and Elizabeth's accession, the agents of Mary's superstitious madness and Pole's fanatical cruelty were chiefly active within two dioceses, and the number of their victims,* great though it was, falls far

Historians differ as to the number of the Marian martyrs. Strype puts the number of persons executed in all the years of Mary's reign, for religious misbelief, at 284; Speed estimates them at 277; Weaver, in the Monuments,' says, 'In the heat of whose' (i. e. Mary's) 'flames were burnt to ashes five bishops, one-and-twenty divines, eight gentlemen, eighty-four artificers, an hundred husbandmen, servants, and labourers, twenty-six wives, twenty widows, nine virgins,

short of the number of persons whom, in several more recent agitations, English rule has put to death with questionable legality, in far briefer spaces of time and within much narrower limits of country, for the maintenance of public order or the attainment of inferior political ends. But though the persecutions burnt most fiercely in special localities, the struggle between new opinion and old dogma was the affair of the whole nation, and every fresh outbreak of fanatical zeal in a particular diocese intensified the national interest in the discussion of the matters at issue, and quickened the intelligence of the whole people. When the fires were lit in Buckinghamshire, the men of Northumberland or Hampshire, Cornwall or Yorkshire, felt that ere a few months had passed similar conflagrations might warm their own market-towns. When Gardyner and Bonner let loose their fury in the sees of Winchester and London, every household in the kingdom was roused with a vivid sense of imminent danger. To fortify themselves in the rules of orthodoxy, and to satisfy themselves that the law was right in putting heretics to death, ordinary folk according to their various degrees of learning had recourse to their manuals of devotion and their priests, and reconsidered every point of the proscribed doctrines. On the other side, to render it clear to their own minds that they could not relinquish the Protestant tenets at the instigation of fear and prudence, without sinning against the Divine Giver of the Gospel light, the reformers read their Bibles in secret more heedfully than ever, raised subtle questions for debate with fellowcompanions in heresy, and, in anticipation of the time when their English Scriptures might be taken from them, learnt daily by heart whole chapters of the sacred writings.

And whilst each of the two parties was thus stimulated to intellectual exertion, the persecution was working, in every social circle and single family, moral results no less important to the national life than the ordinary mental consequences of the

two boys, and two infants; one of them whipped to death by Bonner, and the other, springing out of the mother's womb from the stake as she burned, was thrown again into the fire. Sixty-four more were persecuted for their profession of faith; whereof seven were whipped, sixteen perished in prison, twelve were buried in dunghills. Many lay in captivity, condemned, but were released and saved by the auspicious entrance of peaceable Elizabeth.'

universal ferment. Wherever martyrs perished under the fiery death, domestic dramas were enacted to the illustration of the sublimest and sweetest, the darkest and the meanest, qualities of human nature: and the spectacle of such dramas was an awful education to beholders of quick brain and fine sensibility. Throughout the special districts of persecution, every home that harboured religious inquirers had reason to dread the approach of that most despicable of all domestic traitors, the fireside spy-who, availing himself of the opportunities and powers accorded by hospitality, would wheedle himself into the confidence of simple enthusiasts, and then hand them over to the law, so that they should be burnt for words whispered in their private chambers. Nor were the effects of the pathetic scenes of human malignity and heroism confined to the actual witnesses of their dramatic occurrences. Every story of the persecution was carried from homestead to homestead, and, growing in poetic loveliness and force as it passed from roof to roof, spread in all directions the seeds of romantic excitement and spiritual sympathy.

The average Englishman of the present time is ever ready to extol Shakespeare as the greatest creator of our literature; but he too often needs to be told that Shakespeare's mind was in perfect proportion and harmony with the intellectual life of his period, and that, instead of being a giant amongst dwarfs, as popular adulation too frequently represents him, the poet was a giant amongst giants. We compare him to the Alpine monarch of mountains, but are prone to forget the mountains that surrounded him. He is called a monarch of the forest by obsequious worshippers who forget that to estimate rightly the greatness of its height and the enormity of its girth, the sovereign tree of a primeval wood must be compared with the trees of vast, though smaller, growth, which it overtops, and not with the scrub and brushwood at its foot. No fair notions can be formed of Shakespeare's dignity, and power, and perfect naturalness, if he is considered apart from the times that produced him, and the times which he influenced through personal contact. Separated from his contemporaries, and transplanted as it were from his own grandly heroic period to the present generation, he loses much of his sublimity and the

greater part of his significance. Whilst marvelling at his stature we have nothing at hand, greater than our own smallness, against which to contrast it; and so we must either abstain from critical examination of his parts and proportions, or must try to measure the universe with an inch-rule. Moreover one of the first uses of heroes, when they have passed away, is the light which they throw on their own particular periods. Important though it is that we should know Shakespeare, it is of even greater importance that we should know the generation in which he lived, the London in which he surrounded himself with companions. And this information Shakespeare affords us with a clearness and completeness, characteristic of all his intellectual services, if we regard his genius and career in relation to the social conditions under which he worked, and remember that in intellectual quickness, comprehensiveness, and force he bore to the foremost of his contemporaries just the same proportions as are now-a-days borne by the exceptionally great thinker and artist in letters to the brightest and strongest of his contemporaries. His age was emphatically the heroic age of English story,an age prolific of great statesmen, gallant explorers, subtle thinkers, and fearless seekers after truth. Besides a new drama, which can never be surpassed, it gave us new lands the fullness of whose natural capabilities is still amongst matters of conjecture, new philosophy by whose conclusions we direct our labours of inquiry, a new faith within whose limits the great majority of educated Englishmen are still happy to remain. It was the epoch of Frobisher, and Hawkins, and brave Sir Humphrey Gilbert; of daring Raleigh, and high-souled Sydney; of Francis Bacon and Sir Edward Coke; of Jewell and Hooker, Browne and Cartwright. It was a time when courtiers were men of letters, and soldiers could tell in fitting verse the victories which they won. More than any other age in our story it distinguished itself by sweeping away the rubbish of old errors and setting up the lights and lessons of new discovery, and was remarkable for its abundance of fervour and force in every department of intellectual activity. To account for this excess of mental vigour and enterprise, historians refer to the invention of printing and the revival of letters; and, without doubt, the discovery of the printer's art and the stimulus which it imparted