in the present day indelicate, hoaxes on her. In her youth she wrote charming letters to the cardinal, telling him all the gossip she heard, and it was useful to him in a political point of view. He died before he could reconcile himself to the idea of marrying her; but the queenmother gave her to the Duke de Bouillon, Turenne's nephew. The tastes of the duchess were literary, and she gathered round her all the beaux esprits of the time, and, amongst them Segrais, Benserade, and Menage. Her husband having gone to fight the Turks in Hungary, she took up her residence in his splendid château at Château-Thierry, and there she had La Fontaine the poet presented to her. At that time he was scarcely known, but she appreciated his genius, took him regularly under her protection, excited him to write, and even dictated to him the subjects of several of his poems and fables. Removing to Paris, the duchess made La Fontaine follow her, and there her mansion was the rendezvous of all who were distinguished in letters, arms, politics, or the church. Molière, Corneille, and Turenne were amongst her more constant guests. She, however, did not like Racine, and she was the heart and soul of the faction that attempted to cry him down-when his famous tragedy of Phedre was brought out, she hired every place in the theatre for six successive nights, and had the piece so soundly hissed that it was considered a failure. She encouraged Pradon, Racine's rival, and really thought him the superior of the two. This was a great mistake:

-the name of Pradon is now only remembered from his having been the adversary of Racine, and Racine is immortal. The Phédre, too, which she attempted to destroy, lives still, and will continue to live as long as France shall have a literature. The Duke de Bouillon, returned from the wars, preferred hunting to the brilliant society in which his wife delighted, and the consequence was that he left her a great deal to herself. Young, handsome, courted, idolized, is it astonishing that rumours damaging to her honour were spread? In these rumours the Cardinal Duke d'Albret, a younger brother of de Bouillon, figured. Whether they were justified or not, is not certain; but the Bouillon family deemed them so serious that they had the duchess locked up in a convent. After her release, she got into another scrape with a Count de Louvigny of the de Grammont family,

and was again lodged in conventual durance. Restored to liberty, she led a gay and careless life, surrounded with the most intellectual and the wittiest of French society, and she gave suppers so brilliant that the fame of them has descended to these days. She was accused of dabbling in the poisonings of the horrid La Voisin, but no proof could be brought against her, and she was only subjected to an interrogatory. She bore herself in this interrogatory with exquisite aristocratic insolence, and when it was concluded she swept out of court, expressing aloud her surprise, that "grave judges could ask such silly questions." She passed some time in London, ostensibly on a visit to her sister Hortensia-really, it is believed, on an affaire du cœur; and she was greatly admired by the English. She was here at the Revolution, and was for a time arrested; but William III. sent her back to France in his own yacht. She subsequently visited Italy, and she finished her days in France, remaining to the last what she always had been, the queen of a brilliant circle.

Such were the nephews and nieces of Mazarin; and from this brief analysis of their histories, our readers will be able to judge of the fund of amusement and instruction which M. Rénée's book contains. It may safely be said that it is one of the most agreeable additions that has been made to French literature for many a day. How a man-absorbed by the arduous duty of acting as political director to two of the principal daily newspapers of Paris-who for several months a year is obliged to take a leading part in the labours of the Corps Legislatif of which he is a member-who is, besides, busily concerned with all the passing political events of the day, and is the chosen exponent of the views of the imperial government thereupon-how such a man could find time to make, amongst the dusty manuscripts of libraries, the researches which his subject necessitated, and to work up the materials obtained by those researches in the manner he has done will surprise many. But he is one of the few to whom it is given to excel in more than one line of intellectual activity. And he has his reward for the toil his book has cost him; for it has secured him not only the universal applause of his countrymen, but not a little European renown.

The

In order to enter thoroughly into the spirit of Mr. Froude's history it is needful to know something of the history of the author's own mind. It cannot fail to have struck every attentive reader that there is a peculiar tone about his writings-a tone of mingled sadness and weariness-as of one who felt oppressed by the gravity of the events he was narrating, and who was too sensitive to the mass of human suffering they produced at the moment, to enjoy the prospect of happiness they afforded in the remote future. There is in Mr. Froude none of that buoyant exultation with which Protestant writers generally hail the revival of letters, and the break up of that long frost which had fettered the current of human thought. His accents sound as different from the language of common historians as those of the ploughboy whistling over some ancient battle-field, from the solemn Te Deum chanted there centuries ago, when the cries of the wounded were scarcely yet hushed, and friends lay dead around. cause of this difference it is not difficult to trace in the early prepossessions of the author. Originally attracted by the romantic aspect with which the leaders of the Tractarian party invested their peculiar system, Mr. Froude lacked the steadiness of nerve and clearness of eye to walk along the narrow path of Anglican theology. On one side lay the imposing authority of the Papacy; on the other the novel freedom of scepticism. Here the splendours of the tropical forest; there the liberty of the Arabian desert. In comparison with either of these, the reality of the English system seemed commonplace and meagre. For a time, we fancy Mr. Froude must have gazed with wistful eye into that gorgeous region where so many his companions had disappeared. Till appreciating more fully than they the noxious things which lay behind that inviting exterior, he turned away in despair, and became what we now see him. The mental suffering which Mr. Froude underwent at this period of life cannot be doubted by any one to whom his earlier works are familiar. We have no great faith in these "intellectual agonies in general; but in Mr. Froude's case it would be as absurd to doubt them as in most other cases to believe them. They have left deep marks in his character, and saddened his views of life; but they have helped him greatly to understand the period of which he writes

of

"He jests at scars who never felt a wound." Mr. Froude has felt the wound, and treats the

signs of it in other people with tenderness and sympathy.

But there is another side to the picture, We naturally hate the authors of our sufferings, mental, moral, or physical. When that author comes in the shape of a creed or a principle, our detestation is commonly unmeasured. Mr. Froude, accordingly, while he has words of kindness and charity for all besides, has nothing but bitterness for that particular class of the Reformers whom he chooses to designate as Anglicans. The propriety of that appellation we shall discuss elsewhere. But Mr. Froude's animosity towards this school of churchmen is a key to his admiration of Henry VIII., which is otherwise as remarkable as the odd friendship we may sometimes observe between the most opposite kinds of animals. Not but what we are convinced that Mr. Froude's sentiments are in great part the result of selfdelusion. In our own opinion it would be difficult to find two better representatives of genuine Anglicanism than the two great Tudor sovereigns. A belief in the Apostolical succession, and a regal as opposed to a parliamentary head of the Church are the sum and substance of the high-church theory; and we would not have given much for the life of any subject of either Henry or Elizabeth who dared to question either. But to waive this question, Mr. Froude thinks he sees in Henry the foe of those opinions which he hates with the hatred of a former lover; and he accordingly elevates him into a great Protestant hero.

After this general account of the spirit which pervades Mr. Froude's volumes, we shall proceed to give our readers a brief summary of the matter contained in the two last published ones, which carry us down to the death of Henry in the year 1547.

Of the constitutional history contained in these volumes we may say, like the zoologist of Iceland, there is no constitutional history to be found in any part of these volumes. This is a serious omission, and has been already noticed by more than one of the newspaper critics. It is of the more consequence, because upon precedents afforded by the reign of Henry VIII., were based many of the unconstitutional maxims which cost Queen Elizabeth her popularity, and King Charles his life. If they were wrong in the imitator, they must have been doubly so in the initiator-and they are important moreover as invalidating to some extent those appeals to the public spirit of the

age in which our author so frequently indulges. We need go no further than the first chapter of Hallam's "Constitutional History" to find cases of parliamentary servility which Mr. Froude was bound to refute before basing any hypothesis on the independent spirit of that assembly. We know that Mr. Hallam's mode of writing on this subject is a little obsolete at present, and savours too much of the Hampden and Sydney style of declamation. But nevertheless the fact remains, that parliament consented to provisions, giving Henry a power over the property and lives of his subjects, and over the disposal of his crown, which lead us to believe there is very little else they were likely to have refused him. We say this is a subject upon which Mr. Froude should have entered more fully than he has done. The absolute power acquired by Henry through the destruction of the nobles and the divisions of the church, and the remorseless severity with which he exercised it, may for a time have cowed even the boldest spirit of the day, and have generated a criminal subserviency to the king's pleasure, in which at the present time we find it difficult to believe. These acts of parliament, at all events, show the remarkable influence which Henry had acquired over his subjects, and if he used it to gain political power unknown to the English Constitution, it is quite possible that he might have used it for the gratification of his private passion. Under a monarch like Henry, le roi le veut is cogent logic. There is no alternative between obedience and the imputation of disloyalty—an imputation which often goes far to make the thing itself inevitable; and Mr. Froude seems to overlook the possibility that the disaffection of the great nobles might have sprung in part from aversion to these encroachments of absolutism, as well as from allegiance to the Romish faith. He seems to suppose that they thought nothing of his mode of government, though the indignation they expressed at the ascription of parvenus into the peerage, must have arisen at least as much from political as from social jealousy. A Courtenay or a Neville could have felt no personal jealousy of a Paget or a Russell. But they might have seen in these patricii minorum gentium a facile engine of despotism, as indeed they were for the moment-and have felt towards the new men much as the "revolution families" felt towards Mr. Pitt's plebeian peers. If this were so, then Henry's unconstitutional policy may be said to have provoked the natural amount of resistance and protest-and in that case Mr. Froude's argumeuts, from the countenance afforded him by his nobility, would be much weakened.

But it is, as our readers well know, to the ecclesiastical features of this epoch that Mr. Froude gives his principal attention. With his second volume, "the first act of the great drama" of the Reformation was concluded. The lesser monasteries had been dissolved; the larger were reprieved but for a time. The royal supremacy was established, and the way was paved for those final changes in doctrine and ritual which are narrated in the volumes before us. But so vast a change was naturally not to be accomplished without resistance and reaction. Stunned and stupefied by the first blows which had fallen, the people of England, after a year or two had elapsed, began to recover themselves, and to inquire into the meaning of what had been done. Then burst upon their minds the full significance of the change; and the full anguish of that violent moral wrench which they had undergone, began to make itself felt more acutely, as wounds scarcely noticed in the moment of infliction grow painful when the excitement is over. Combining themselves with these feelings which were shared in common by the peasantry, gentry, and nobility, were other and peculiar grievances belonging to each of them separately. The enclosure of wastes and commons had irritated the lower orders. Recent alterations in the tenure of land had exercised a similar influence on the landed proprietors. And the higher nobility felt their consequence diminished by the destruction of those religious institutions which were alike monuments of ancestral piety, and sources of present dignity. As the deer of Silvia, when wounded by the arrow of Ascanius, fled groaning to its well-known haunts, and roused to fury the pitying and indignant rustics, so did the milk-white Hind betake herself in her agony to the castles and cottages of the north, and, showing her wounds and her danger, excite the devoted population to arms in her behalf.

Improvisi adsunt: hic torre armatus obusto,
Stipitis hic gravidi nodis: quodcuique repertum
Rimanti telum ira facit. Vocat agmina Tyrrheus,
Quadrifidam quercum cuneis ut forte coactis
Scindebat, raptâ spirans immane securi.
At sæva e speculis tempus Dea nacta nocendi
Ardua tecta petit stabuli et de culmine summo
Pastorale canit signum, cornuque recurvo
Tartaream intendit vocem: qua protenus omne
Contremuit nemus, et silvæ intonuere profundæ,
Audiit et Triviæ longe lacus; audiit amnis
Sulfureâ Nar albus aquâ, fontesque Velini
Et trepida matres pressêre ad pectora natos.
Tum vero ad vocem celeres qua buccina signum
Dira dedit, raptis concurrunt undique telis
Indomiti agricolæ; necnon et Troia pubes
Ascanio auxilium castris effundit apertis :
Direxêre acies; nec jam certamine agresti
Stipitibus duris agitur sudibus ve præustis.
Now let us hear Mr. Froude :-

It was Michaelmas, then, in the year 1536. Towards the fall of the summer, clergy from the southern counties had been flitting northward, and on their return had talked mysteriously to their parishioners of impending insurrections, in which honest men would bear their part. In Yorkshire and Lincolnshire the stories of the intended destruction of parish churches had been vociferously circulated; and Lord Hussey, at his castle at Sleaford, had been heard to say to one of the gentlemen of the county, that "the world would never mend until they fought for it." September passed away; at the end of the month, the nunnery of Legbourne, near Louth, was suppressed by the visitors, and two servants of Cromwell were left in the house, to complete the dissolution. On Monday, the 2nd of October, Heneage, one of the examiners under the clerical commission, was coming, with the chancellor of the Bishop of Lincoln, into Louth itself, and the clergy of the neighbourhood were to appear and submit themselves to inspection.

The evening before being Sunday, a knot of people gathered on the green in the town. They had the great silver cross belonging to the parish with them; and as a crowd collected about them, a voice cried, "Masters, let us follow the cross; God knows whether ever we shall follow it hereafter or nay." They formed in procession, and went round the streets; and after vespers, a party, headed "by one Nicholas Melton, who, being a shoemaker, was called Captain Cobler," appeared at the doors of the church, and required the churchwardens to give them the key of the jewel chamber. The chancellor, they said, was coming the next morning, and intended to seize the plate. The churchwardens hesitating, the keys were taken by force. The chests were opened, the crosses, chalices, and candlesticks "were shewed openly in the sight of every man," and then, lest they should be stolen in the night, an armed watch kept guard till daybreak in the church aisles.

At nine o'clock on Monday morning Heneage entered the town, with a single servant. The chancellor was ill, and could not attend. As he rode in, the alarm-bell pealed out from Louth Tower. The inhabitants swarmed into the streets with bills and staves; "the stir and the noise arising hideous." The commissioner, in panic at the disturbance, hurried into the church for sanctuary; but the protection was not allowed to avail him. He was brought out into the market-place, a sword was held to his breast, and he was sworn at an extemporized tribunal to be true to the commons, upon pain of death. "Let us swear! let us all swear!" was then the cry. A general oath was drawn. The townsmen swore-all strangers resident swore they would be faithful to the king, the commonwealth, and to Holy Church.

The

In the heat of the enthusiasm appeared the registrar of the diocese, who had followed Heneage with his books, in which was enrolled Cromwell's commission. Instantly clutched, he was dragged to the marketcross. A priest was mounted on the stone steps, and commanded to read the commission aloud. He began; but the "hideous clamour" drowned his voice. crowd, climbing on his shoulders, to overlook the pages, bore him down. He flung the book among the mob, and it was torn leaf from leaf, and burnt upon the spot. The registrar barely escaped with his life: he was rescued by friends, and hurried beyond the gates.

Meanwhile, a party of the rioters had gone out to Legbourne, and returned, bringing Cromwell's servants, who were first set in the stocks, and thrust afterwards into the town gaol.

So passed Monday. The next morning, early, the common bell was again ringing. Other commissioners were reported to be at Castre, a few miles distant; and

Melton the shoemaker, and "one great James," a tailor, with a volunteer army of horse and foot, harnessed and unharnessed, set out to seize them. The alarm had spread; the people from the neighbouring villages joined them as they passed, or had already risen, and were in marching order. At Castre they found the commissioners fled; but a thousand horse were waiting for them, and the number every moment increasing. Whole parishes marched in, headed by their clergy. A rendezvous was fixed at Rotherwell; and at Rotherwell, on that day, or the next, beside the commons, "there were priests and monks" (the latter fresh ejected from their monasteries-pensioned, but furious) "to the number of seven or eight hundred." Some were "bidding their bedes," and praying for the pope and cardinals; some were in full harness, or armed with such weapons as they could find: all were urging on the people. They had, as yet, no plans. What would the gentlemen do? was the question. "Kill the gentlemen," the priests cried; "if they will not join us, they shall all be hanged." This difficulty was soon settled. They were swept up from their halls, or wherever they could be found. The oath was offered them, with the alternative of instant death; and they swore against their will, as all afterwards pretended, and as some perhaps sincerely felt; but when the oath was once taken, joining with a hearty unanimity, and bringing in with them their own armed retainers, and the stores from their houses. Sir Edward Madyson came in, Sir Thomas Tyrwhit and Sir William Ascue. Lord Borough, who was in Ascue's company when the insurgents caught him, rode for his life, and escaped. One of his servants was overtaken in the pursuit, was wounded mortally, and shriven on the field.

So matters went at Louth and Castre. On Tuesday, October 3rd, the country rose at Horncastle, in the same manner, only on an even larger scale. On a heath in that neighbourhood, there was "a great muster;" the gentlemen of the county came in, in large numbers, with Mr. Dymmock, the sheriff, at their head. Doctor Mackarel, the Abbot of Barlings, was present with his canons, in full armour. From the abbey came a waggon-load of victuals; oxen and sheep were driven in from the neighbourhood; and a retainer of the abbey carried a banner, on which was worked a plough, a chalice and a host, a horn, and the five wounds of Christ. The sheriff, with his brother, rode up and down the heath, giving money among the crowd; and the insurrection now gaining point, another gentleman "wrote on the field, upon his saddlebow," a series of articles, which were to form the ground of the rising.

The same Tuesday there was a rising at Lincoln. Bishop Longlands' palace was attacked and plundered, and the town occupied by armed bodies of insurgents. By the middle of the week the whole country was in movement-beacons blazing, alarm-bells ringing; and, pending the reply of the king, Lincoln became the focus to which the separate bodies from Castre, Horncastle, Louth, and all other towns and villages, flocked in for head-quarters.

Such was the first outburst of the " Pilgrimage of Grace," which, had it been actuated by unity of design, might probably have cost Henry his throne, and retarded the reformation for a century. It was temporarily suppressed. But the fire still smouldered, and at length broke out anew with far greater vigour than before. We cannot bring ourselves to shorten the following extract :

In less than a fortnight a rebellion of sixty thousand persons had subsided as suddenly as it had risen. Contrived by the monks and parish priests, it had been conducted without concert, without practical skill. The clergy had communicated to their instruments alike their fury and their incapacity.

But the insurrection in Lincolnshire was but the first shower which is the herald of the storm.

On the night of the 12th of October, there was present at an inn in Lincoln, watching the issue of events, a gentleman of Yorkshire, whose name, a few weeks later, was ringing through every English household in accents of terror or admiration.

Our story must go back to the beginning of the month. The law vacation was drawing to its close, and younger brothers in county families who then, as now, were members of the inns of court, were returning from their holidays to London. The season had been of unusual beauty. The summer had lingered into the autumn, and during the latter half of September young Sir Ralph Ellerkar, of Ellerkar Hall in "Yorkyswold," had been entertaining a party of friends for cub-hunting. Among his guests were his three cousins, John, Robert, and Christopher Aske. John, the eldest, the owner of the old family property of Aughton-on-the-Derwent, a quiet, unobtrusive gentleman, with two sons, students at the temple. Robert, of whom, till he now emerges into light, we discover only that he was a barrister in good practice at Westminster; and Christopher, the possessor of an estate in Marshland in the West Riding. The Askes were highly connected, being cousins of the Earl of Cumberland, whose eldest son, Lord Clifford, had recently married a daughter of the Duke of Suffolk, and niece therefore of the kiug.

The hunting party broke up on the 3rd of October, and Robert, if his own account of himself is true, left Ellerkar with no other intention than of going direct to London to his business. His route lay across the Humber at Welton, and when in the ferry he heard from the boatmen that the commons were up in Lincolnshire. He wished to return, but the state of the tide would not allow him; he then endeavoured to make his way by by-roads and bridle-paths to the house of a brother-in-law at Sawcliff; but he was met somewhere near Appleby by a party of the rebels. They demanded who he was, and on his replying, they offered him the popular oath. It is hard to believe that he was altogether taken by surprise; a man of so remarkable powers as he afterwards exhibited, could not have been wholly ignorant of the condition of the country, and if his loyalty had been previously sound, he would not have thrown himself into the rising with such deliberate energy. The people by whom he was "taken," as he designated what had befallen him, became his bodyguard to Sawcliff. He must have been well known in the district. His brother's property lay but a few miles distant, across the Trent, and as soon as the news spread that he was among the rebels, his name was made a rallying cry. The command of the district was assigned to him from the Humber to Kirton, and for the next few days he remained endeavouring to organize the movement into some kind of form; but he was doubtful of the prospects of the rebellion, and doubtful of his own conduct. The commons of the West Riding beginning to stir, he crossed into Marshland; he passed the Ouse into Howdenshire, going from village to village, and giving orders that no bells should be rung, no beacon should be lighted, except on the receipt of a special message from himself.

Leaving his own country, he again hastened back to his command in Lincolnshire; and by this time he heard of Suffolk's advance with the king's answer to the petition. He rode post to Lincoln, and reached

the town to find all in confusion-the commons and the gentlemen on the verge of fighting. He endeavoured to make his way into the cathedral close, but finding himself suspected by the commons, and being told that he would be murdered if he persevered, he remained in concealment till Suffolk had made known the intentions of the government; then, perhaps satisfied that the opportunity was past, perhaps believing that if not made use of on the instant, it might never recur, perhaps resigning himself to be guided by events, he went back at full speed to Yorkshire.

And events had decided: whatever his intentions may have been, the choice was no longer open to him. As he rode down at midnight to the bank of the Humber, the clash of the alarm-bells came pealing far over the water. From hill to hill, from church tower to church tower, the warning lights were shooting. The fishermen on the German Ocean watched them flickering in the darkness from Spurnhead to Scarborough, from Scarborough to Berwick-upon-Tweed. They streamed westward, over the long marshes across Spalding Moor; up the Ouse and the Wharf, to the watershed where the rivers flow into the Irish Sea. The mountains of Westmoreland sent on the message to Kendal, to Cockermouth, to Penrith, to Carlisle; and for days and nights there was one loud storm of bells and blaze of beacons from the Trent to the Cheviot Hills.

All Yorkshire was in movement. Strangely, too, as Aske assures us, he found himself the object of an unsought distinction. His own name was the watchword which every tongue was crying. In his absence an address had gone out around the towns, had been hung on church-doors, aud posted on market-crosses, which bore his signature, though, as he protested, it was neither written by himself, nor with his consent. Ill composed, but with a rugged eloquence, it called upon all good Englishmen to make a stand for the Church of Christ, which wicked men were destroying, for the commonwealth of the realm, and for their own livings, which were stolen from them by impositions. For those who would join it should be well; those who refused to join, or dared to resist, should be under Christ's curse, and be held guilty of all the Christian blood which should be shed.

For a time the new outbreak carried every thing before it. A regular army gradually grew out of the heterogeneous mass of malcontents. It was commanded by able and gallant men bearing names round which the people had rallied for centuries. The objects it proposed to achieve were such as came home to the hearts of every man in it. The labourer was again to tend his cows and his geese on the village common when the day's work was over; and to see the lives of his children regulated by the same beautiful succession of ceremonies which had regulated his own from infancy. The farmer was again to enjoy the easy leases of the monastic lands. The gentry were to save from destruction those fair edifices which adorned their native counties, and testified to their own importance. And the great nobles were to shake themselves free from the tyranny of a heretic king, and the insolence of a parvenu peerage. However erroneous in themselves, these are the colours in which the object of the insurrection pre