said, in rich vestments especially furnished for the purpose; newly-painted images of 'our Lady' to be set up, with tapers ever burning; the chimes in the steeple to be repaired; the priest to have a yearly reward, or a residence, and at each meal to repeat the name of the testator, that they who hear may say, 'God have mercy on his soul'; a Latin sentence to be written 'on the fore part of the iron about my grave,' and therewith 'the pardon which I purchased'; ten pounds 'to a priest for to go to Rome, and I will that the said priest go to the stations and say masses as is according to a pilgrim.' Henry VII engaged two thousand masses, at sixpence (!) each, to be said for the repose of his soul.

It was universally taught that innumerable evil spirits were ranging over the world, seeking the present misery and future ruin of mankind,- fallen spirits that retained the angelic capacities, and directed against men the energies of superhuman malice. The brave yeomen, who fronted danger in the field, quailed before the gentle Maid as a sorceress. A proclamation was issued to the soldiery to reassure them against the incantations of the girl. The Duke of Bedford wrote to the king:

All things here prospered for you till the time of the siege of Orleans, undertaken of whose advice God only knows. Since the death of my cousin of Salisbury, whom God absolve, who fell by the hand of God, as it seemeth, your people, who were assembled in great number at this siege, have received a terrible check. This has been caused in part, as we trow, by the confidence our enemies have in a disciple and limb of the Devil, called Pucelle, that used false enchantments and sorcery. The which stroke and discomfiture has not only lessened the number of your people here, but also sunk the courage of the remainder in a wonderful manner, and encouraged your enemies to assemble themselves forthwith in great numbers.'

The shrivelled arm of Richard III was attributed to witchcraft. A duchess, convicted of practicing magic against the king's life, was compelled to do penance in the streets, while two of her servants were executed. Satan with his feudatories and vassalscast out from Olympus and Asgard, outlawed by the new dynastylurked in forest and mountain, and issuing forth only after nightfall, raised the desolating tempest, sent the pestilential blast, and kept body and soul together by an illicit traffic between this world and the other. The fancy that once lay warm about the heart, now sends a chill among the roots of the hair.

So flourished, outwardly, the empire of Rome, while ideas became the occasions of superstition, and forms of ritualism dis

placed a living consciousness. Religious discourses, without judgment or spirit, were a motley mixture of gross fiction and extravagant invention. Practical religion was a very simple affair. The one thing needful for a sinner, however scandalous his moral life, was to confess regularly, to receive the sacrament, to be absolved. If sick, or ill at ease, he might be recommended to some wonder-working image, which would bow when it was pleased, and avert its head if the present was unsatisfactory. For every mass-usually bought by the dozen-so many years were struck off from the penal period. The rulers of the Church, who once tamed the fiery Northern warriors by the magic of their sanctity, were sunk into luxurious indolence and vice. The popes, who once lived to remind men of the eternal laws which they ought to obey, were, almost without exception, worldly, intriguing, and immoral. Several were murderers, most were plunderers, one was poisoned by his successor, another was elected by menaces and bribes, the last died by the poison he had mingled for others who stood in the way of his greed and ambition. Prelates, cardinals, and abbots were occupied chiefly in maintaining their splendor. The friars and the secular clergy who were to live for others, not for themselves, turned their spiritual powers to account to obtain from the laity the means for their self-indulgence. The monks, who once lived in an enchanted atmosphere of piety and beneficence, were so many herds of lazy, illiterate, and licentious Epicureans, dividing their hours between the chapel, the tavern, and the brothel,-all scheming or dreaming on the eve of the judgment day! The priesthood, amenable only to spiritual judges, extend the privileges of their order till clerk was construed to mean any one who could write his name or read a sentence. A robber or an assassin had only to show that he could do either, and he was allowed what was called the 'benefit of clergy.'

Now consider that such men owned a third or a half of the land in every country of Europe, while they confined their views in life to opulence, idleness, and feasting. At the installation of the Archbishop of York, brother of the King-Maker, there were present 3,500 persons, who consumed, 104 oxen and 6 wild bulls, 1,000 sheep, 304 calves, as many hogs, 2,000 swine, 500 stags, bucks, and does, 204 kids, 22,802 wild or tame fowls, 300 quar

ters of corn, 300 tuns of ale, 100 of wine, a pipe of hippocras, 12 porpoises and seals. The Commons declared that with the revenues of the English Church the king would be able to maintain 15 earls, 1,500 knights, 6,200 squires, and 100 hospitals; each earl receiving annually 300 marks, each knight 100 marks, and the produce of four ploughed lands; each squire 40 marks, and the produce of two ploughed lands.

Was not a reformation of some sort an overwhelming necessity? So felt the people, who, if unable to comprehend an argument, were anxious for a correction of abuses. So felt the higher natures who led them, believing in justice, in righteousness, above all in truth, and caring not to live unless they lived nobly. So felt the Church-which repressed them, by entreaty, by remonstrance, by bribery, by force. The king and the peers allied themselves with the ecclesiastics. In 1400 the Statute of Heretics was passed; and William Santre, a priest, became the first English martyr. A tailor, who denied transubstantiation-accused of having said that, if it were true, there were twenty thousand gods in every cornfield in England—was next committed to the flames. A nobleman, hung on the gallows with a fire blazing at his feet, suffered the double penalty for heresy and treason. Lollardism was crushed by the weight of the establishment above, but its principles, infecting all classes, from the lowest to the highest, were working a silent revolution. The soft spring green withered away, but its roots were quick in the soil. The clergy did not dream that the storm would gather again. For a moment they were startled by a statute of Henry VII 'for the more sure and likely reformation of priests, clerks, and religious men'; but again the cloud disappeared, and again they forgot the warning. At this moment the Church, ever richer and more glittering, dazzled the eyes to the decay of its substance, like some majestic iceberg drifting southward out of the frozen. North, seemingly stable as the eternal rocks, while down in the far deeps the base is dissolving and the centre of gravity is changing.

Learning. Intellectual life disappeared with religious liberty. Learning declined, especially at Oxford. Her scholars became travelling mendicants, whose academical credentials were at times turned into ridicule and mockery by the insolence of

rank and wealth.

ure.

said:

The monasteries were no longer seats of cultTwenty years after Chaucer's death, an Italian traveller

I found in them men given up to sensuality in abundance, but very few lovers of learning, and those of a barbarous sort, skilled more in quibbles and sophisms than in literature.'

Knowledge was a stagnant morass or an impenetrable jungle. Literary production was nearly at an end. Puerile chroniclers, scribblers of prosaic commonplaces, translators from the wornout field of French romance, give some distention to a period that would else collapse. An occasional gleam of genius faintly illuminates a date, like the last flicker of the dying day, or the pulse of the early dawn,—

'As if the morn had waked, and then
Shut close her lids of light again."

In the nobler elements of national life, a dreary one-hundred years, whose chief consolation is, that the downward touches the upward movement; that everywhere in the common soil-the unconsidered people, sustained by the surviving Saxon character-lay the forces of which fruit should come. The popular cast of authorship shows the stir of a new interest among the masses. With a paucity of writers, in no former age were so many books transcribed. It is proof of an increased demand, that the process of copying was transferred from the monastic to the secular class. And it was this transfer that led to the introduction of printing. At first a secret and occult art. The monopolizers dreaded discovery, and the workmen were bound After their operato secrecy by the solemnity of an oath.

tions, the four sides of their forms were cautiously unscrewed, and the scattered type thrown beneath, for 'when the component parts of the press are in pieces, no one will understand what they mean.' In a mystical style, they impressed upon the wondering reader that the volume he held was of supernatural origin, announcing merely that it was 'neither drawn, nor written with a pen and ink, as all books before had been.' But the freemasonry was lost, the printers were dispersed; and at Cologne a plain English trader-Caxton-was initiated into the 'noble mystery and craft. Very proud of the marvellous freight with which he returns after an absence of five-and-thirty years; very eager in

his zeal when he remembers the tedious, weary method of the Scriptorium, hardly equal to the production of a hundred Bibles in seven thousand days; almost professing, in his first printed work, to have performed a miracle:

'I have practiced and learned, at my great charge, to put in order this said book in print after the manner and form as ye may here see; and is not written with pen and ink as other books be, to the end that every man may have them AT ONCE: for all the books of this story, thus imprinted as ye see, were begun in one day, and also finished in one day.' Not unwilling to keep up the wonder and mystery of the new implement which men did not yet comprehend.'

In 1453, the Crescent advanced upon the city of Constantine, the Greek Empire fell, Greek scholars were driven westward, Greek literature and art were forced into Italy; and Plato lived again, to join the ranks of the reformers. His mild and divine wisdom was at war with the sensuality that had become the scandal of the Church of Rome. 'Beware of the Greek,' ran the clerical proverb, 'lest you be made a heretic.' Italy that already, in the preceding age, had appropriated whatever Latin letters contained of strength or splendor to arouse the thought and fancy, became the school of Christendom. Thither repaired the men of taste or genius who desired to share the newly-discovered privileges of antiquity; and, quickened by the magnetic touch, returned with a generous ambition to vie with the noble ancients. Thence the stream of civilization was to flow as from its fount. With a fluctuating movement, the life current extended throughout Western Europe, England being among the latest to feel it. When gleams of the revival had long struggled with the scholastic cloud, the Greek language began to be taught at Oxford, and about 1490 they began to read the classics. Thence was to come every science and every elegance.

Language. The emancipation of the national tongue was now confirmed by another monarch. Henry V, in a missive to the craft of brewers, declared:

The English tongue hath in modern days begun to be honorably enlarged and adorned; and for the better understanding of the people, the common idiom should be exercised in writing.'

1 Who first taught to carve the letters on wooden blocks-who imagined to cast the metal with fusil types distinct one from the other, that is, for Europe, a German romance with the opening pages forever wanting. Faust, Schöffer, Gutenberg, Costar, have their jealous votaries. The origin of some of the most interesting inventions is lost in obscure traditions. Perhaps the Chinese, who had practiced the art of block-printing for nearly two thousand years, suffered it to steal away over their great wall.' But the same extraordinary invention may occur at distinct periods. Friar Bacon indicated the ingredients of gunpowder a hundred years before the monk Schwartz, about 1330, actually struck out the fiery explosion.