in your obituary, that General Harrison, the late President of the United States, was born in Virginia; which corroborates the statements I formerly adduced concerning eminent natives of the South.* It is still further remarkable that a state which, till a recent period, had a religious establishment (in unison with the Church of England) should have produced so large a share of eminent men.-At p. 608, the Swedes are described as Swash-bucklers-a character quite in accordance with a French adage which calls them les Gascons du Nord. Another French proverb says of them (in a character of different nations), "On ne peut pas avoir été guerrier, et être." Few nations, however, have more brilliant periods in their history to point to, than the Swedes.-Before quitting the subject of this letter, I would just recall an anecdote, mentioned in the Life of Sir John Sinclair, of a Scotchman who remarked to Dr. Johnson, that the Scotch had no such epoch in their history as the Conquest. National partiality does not see very clearly, for the history of Cromwell forms rather an objection to the meaning of this assertion, though not to its form. It is due to Scottish feelings to say, that Montesquieu has accounted best for the successes of Cromwell, which were greater than those of any preceding invader. "C'est que la difference est totale entre une armée fanatique et une armée bigote. On le vit, dans nos temps modernes, dans une révolution fameuse, lorsque l'armée de Cromwell étoit comme celle des Arabes, et les armées d'Irlande et d'Ecosse comme celles des Grecs." (Grandeur et Dec. c. xxii.) The Greeks of the seventh century are meant here.-The Independents, who formed Cromwell's army, were a new sect, and their zeal was in its freshness, while that of the Presbyterians had begun to cool, as its former enemies, the Episcopalians, had been put down.

Yours, &c. CYDWELI.

*See vol. i. p. 145 and 369. Was not La Fayette a native of a southern province ? If southern origin, as in the case of Talleyrand and Polignac, affects the question, it should also in the case of Madame de Stael, though in other respects from Paris.

I HAVE no hesitation in troubling you with the following remarks, being well assured of your willingness to devote a portion of your Magazine to any subject which serves either to illustrate or throw additional light upon the actions of eminent individuals,― and there is no name in British history for which Protestant Englishmen should feel a greater reverence than that of the person of whom I am about to speak-the Patriarch Reformer, John Wickliffe. The result of these remarks will, I feel confident, not only clear him from several inconsistencies of conduct, but from the graver charge preferred by Anthony Wood, Dr. Fell, Bishop of Oxford, and other writers, that the zeal which he displayed in withstanding the errors of Papacy, was occasioned by nothing else than the loss of the Wardenship of Canterbury Hall, Oxford, of which he was first deprived by Archbishop Langham, and finally by Pope Urban V., and that "what he afterwards did was merely out of revenge, and not all of conscience, and that being a man of good parts, he exercised them towards an evil end." "'*

It is an extraordinary fact, but not the less true, that there were living at the same period two John Wickliffes, -both born about the same timeboth educated as ecclesiastics at Oxford, and becoming there the heads of houses, the one of Canterbury, and the other of Baliol-both prebendaries, the one of Worcester, and the other of Chichester-and both dying within a year of each other. This is, however, the case, and it is the more remarkable as the name of Wickliffe is a local one, and the only locality in England bearing the name is the village about six miles from the town of Richmond in Yorkshire, where the Reformer is said to have been born in or about the year 1324.t

In compiling a History of the Palace of Mayfield in Sussex, formerly one of the numerous residences of the Archbishop of Canterbury, (and of which notice is taken in the 46th vo

* Wood's Antiq. Oxon. vol. i. 484. + Vaughan's Life of Wickliffe, vol. i. p. 229.

lume of your Magazine, page 464,) I had occasion to consult the registers of the see, for the purpose of ascertaining the early vicars of that parish, which lies within the peculiar jurisdiction of the Archbishop; and I was not a little surprised to find, in the year 1361, and on the 12 Cal. August (21 July), John Wickliffe collated to the vicarage by Archbishop Islip-the prelate who, rather more than four years after, is stated to have preferred John Wickliffe the Reformer to be warden of his then lately founded Hall of Canterbury at Oxford. Islip's deed of appointment bears date at Mayfield, 5 id. Dec. (9 Dec.) 1365, at which place he had been resident with little intermission from the time at which (as before mentioned) he collated John Wickliffe vicar, in 1361; and from the manner in which he speaks of the person whom he had appointed to the wardenship, as a man in whose "fidelity, circumspection and industry he much confided, and whom he called to that office on account of the honesty of his life, his laudable conversation, and his knowledge of letters," it is evident that he was then well known to him, and that the words are something more than those of mere form. Upon examining the documents appointing the vicar of Mayfield, and the warden of Canterbury Hall, I found the final syllable of the name to be clyve in both instances; and although the orthography of a name at this period of time is very uncertain, still as connected with what I have hereafter to state, it is worthy of observation that such is the spelling of the name attributed to the Master of Canterbury Hall, in 1361 and 1365, whilst the name of the Master of Baliol in 1361 § and 1368 is spelt with the last syllable lif or liffe-the spelling invariably attributed to the Reformer's name in all original evidences concerning him.

If, under these circumstances, any doubt remained that the Vicar of Mayfield had, from the constant in

Wood's Antiq Oxon. vol. i. p. 484. + Reg. Islip, in dioc. Cant. fol. 287b. Wood's Antiq. Oxon. (edit. 1674), vol. i. 184.

§ Wood's Antiq. Oxon. vol. iii. p. 82. Reg. Bockingham, in dioc. Linc.

tercourse which had subsisted between them for four years, been appointed by his patron to the wardenship of Canterbury Hall upon his deposition of Wodehull the monk, and his associates, it would entirely have vanished upon finding further that Islip, at the period of his decease in April 1366, a few months after Wickliffe's appointment, was about to appropriate towards the support of the master or warden, the rectory of the parish of Mayfield, which he had not thought of doing upon his appointment of Wodehull in 1363, but his death occurred before any such appropriation could be completed. An earlier trace of the Reformer's preferment in the Church, than any hitherto known of him, was thus thought to be clearly established, for, having identified the Vicar of Mayfield with the Warden of Canterbury-a preferment attributed to him by all who ever wrote concerning his life and actions,* I had little idea of finding that, although the Vicar of Mayfield and the Warden of Canterbury were one, the Warden of Canterbury Hall and the Reformer were two distinct individuals. Such, however, proves to have been the case; for, upon further search into the Archbishop's records, it was found that in 1380 the Vicar of Mayfield exchanged that preferment for Horsted Kaynes, in the same county,† and that he died in 1383 Rector of Horsted Kaynes, and Prebendary of Chichester; his will being dated 12, and proved 21 November in that year, only the year previous to the decease of the Rector of Lutterworth.

Having thus clearly deprived the Reformer of the Wardenship of Canterbury Hall, and bestowed it upon another individual, the mystery which shrouded several of the earlier transactions of his life-the inconsistency which seems to have tinctured some portions of his behaviour, and the charge made against him, that malice towards the Pope for his deprivation influenced his conduct, were at once dispelled. In the first place, his biographers find that he was originally of

Queen's College, Oxford; then of Merton; appointed in 1361 Master of Baliol, and in 1365 leaving the headship of that, which was the oldest foundation at Oxford, excepting University, to accept the Wardenship of Canterbury Hall, which was then quite an infant institution; but all difficulty disappears when we consider the Master of Canterbury Hall and Vicar of Mayfield to have been the John Wickliffe of Merton College (the place where Simon Islip his patron had been educated), and the Reformer to have been the John Wickliffe of Queen's College (generally the resort of students from the north), and Master of Baliol, there being direct evidence of the latter preferment pertaining to him. Langham, the successor of Islip in the see of Canterbury, is stated by all his (Wickliffe's) biographers to have deposed the Reformer from the wardenship, on the ground of his being a secular Priest, and not a Monk, and that he immediately appealed to the Pope for justice against the judgment of his metropolitan, and restoration to his preferment; but even whilst the cause is pending, we are told that he was not slow in discovering himself, both to be a bitter enemy of the Pope and of the corruptions of the Church. Had these been the acts of one and the same person, they would undoubtedly have evinced much in consistency of conduct, to say nothing of the total want of policy which might have led him to abstain, at least for a while, from doing aught to exasperate the Pontiff, until a decision in his cause had been made; for that he was solicitous to retain the wardenship, is evident from his part in the appeal. This inconsistency, however, vanishes, when we find that the suppliant for the Pope's favour was not the individual who at the same time was violent in his invectives against him. The dispute about the wardenship was at length decided against Wickliffe; and Mr. Vaughan, in his Life of the Reformer, observes," So little was he affected by it, that I am not aware of a single reference to it in any of his writings,* thus unconscious

* Vaughan's Life of Wickliffe, vol. i. p. 318.

ly affording strong evidence that he (the Reformer) was not at all interested in the matter; and besides these several circumstances-whilst on the one hand the decree of the Pope was confirmed by Edward III., which (standing as matters then did between the Pope and King) would assuredly have not been the case had it concerned the Reformer, then one of the King's Chaplains, and who had been employed by him and obtained his favour in defending his cause against the Pope; on the other hand, the Pope's decree makes no allusion whatever to the doctrines of him whom he deprived-doctrines which even at that time were deemed to be heretical, and would in themselves have furnished sufficient grounds for displacing him; moreover, the decree sets forth by sty ling him "dilectus filius" (beloved son), a term which (although commonly applied by the Pope to the clergy as his spiritual children), could by no means be used towards a heretic by the infallible head of the Church of Rome.

Thus the most serious charge ever made against Wickliffe-that malice towards the Pontiff for depriving him of his preferment, was the main spring of his future conduct, is entirely disproved, and the well-head of Protestantism cleansed from that pollution which, according to many writers, tainted it at its very source; and far more delightful must it be for every Protestant to feel assured that the waters of which he and his ancestors have quaffed so deeply, gushed forth at once in native purity from an unpolluted source, rather than like the principles of the Reformation, which poured not onward in full tide, until they had long struggled amidst the whirlpool of evil passions which beset the heart of him through whom that mighty event was brought to pass.