with him to France, and used it at the siege of Dieppe in burning the English vessels then in harbour. There is nothing new it seems under the sun; and, if we are to believe the same worthy authority, modern "infernals" cannot claim for their constructors much novelty of invention, since there seems to have been the same amount of mischievous ingenuity amongst our ancestors. He says, that there was an engineer named Gaubet, a native of France, who found out the secret of preserving, even under water, a kind of artificial fire enclosed in earthen pots without any openings. He was so excellent a diver as to be able to pass under a river: of this secret he availed himself so far as to succeed in setting fire to some thick palisades that stopped up the entrance to the Isle of Andely, which Philip was then besieging. At the time the enemy made an attack on the bridge which that prince had built over the Seine, and when all the attention of the besieged was directed that way, Gaubet dived with his pots under the palisades and set fire to them. Boats having been prepared for the soldiers, the isle was surprized on that side and the garrison of the castle compelled to capitulate." We do not vouch for the truth of this: we can only say that, if it be true, it beats all that French and American engineers have threatened to do, but, as far as we know, have never done. It is a pity for himself that Gaubet is not alive: he and his pots would have been a capital catch for the Adelaide or the Polytechnic.

To return, however, to our book. The author has given us some of the truths held by men in the middle ages, but scarcely any of the fictions, of which, it would seem, there were not a few; and yet, we would humbly suggest that, without a knowledge of these, it is impossible to form a fair estimate of the actual condition of these times; for it must not be forgotten that, whilst the truth is the secret treasure of the few, the fiction is the common inheritance of the many. Whatever is valuable in institutions or in systems is not, after all, so much the characteristic or the exclusive possession of any one particular age; but is generally the result of the cumulative wisdom of all, the necessities or better perception of each successive generation retaining that which experience has tested, abstracting that which may have become per.. nicious or obsolete, and adding that which any fresh and nascent condition coevally brings to birth. Great men, far beyond their fellows, there have ever been and always will be; and it would seem that upon these properly devolves the work of removing what may have become effete, or of bringing forth

such fresh elements as may be needed. The result of their labour is the characteristic truth which has distinguished every age as indicative both of its necessity and progress. These men must, in a sense, express the mind of their generation; and, though oftentimes at an immeasurable distance, betray that which they have in common with the most ignorant of the day in which they live. Whoever will trace the progress of civilization through the calendar of time, with reference to man's character and deeds, will be able surely to ascertain the processes of this cumulative wisdom, and mark where halts have been made and increasing impetus received in its onward course. It is of the blessing of this wisdom that we are now reaping. What of liberty we enjoy in the State-what of light we have in the Church-what of comfort and refinement we experience in the intercourse of social life, is owing, not to any sudden act, outbreak, instanstaneous illumination, or unprepared discovery of any one class, or age, or man; but to the legitimate results which the necessities of an altered condition generated--the slow but steady growth of ordained principles to their true developments-and the natural issue of increasing knowledge. The truth is God's; something of it there has ever been with man, for He always, in His mercy, has been near to him. As long as He shall preserve His ainbassadors upon earth with their ministry of reconciliation, that truth must manifest itself; and, in proportion as faith finds a place in the spirit of statesmen, priests, or princes, so will all national acts and all forms of public teaching preserve the golden impress of this most precious of all moral treasures. No man, therefore, can lay his hand upon the institutions of any age and say, "There is no truth here." We know that, as the spirit of life successively tore aside the cumbrous coverings which the cruel care of her nursing by dark ignorance had thrown around her, to the hindrance of all healthful breathing and vigorous action, so her growing vigour became discernible in the successive impartations of truth and light to the greater institutions of Christendom. It is not then to the successive cycles or periods of British history, in isolation from each other, that we must look for that which we possess in the form of state verities or civil privileges-it is not to the struggle of the rude Briton with the polished Roman -of the English churl with his Saxon master-the Saxon serf with his Norman conqueror-nor to the fierce contention of the lawless baron with his grasping monarch—it is not to the strife for privilege which has so often existed between the

Church and the State, the commons and the throne-it is not to these alone in separateness-it is not to any one of these that we must look for the blessings we enjoy. They must rather be traced to whatever elements of righteousness there were in any one of these contentions, and they come of the silent but sure consolidation of such elements into systems. There is no element of righteousness which, does not in due time bear its fruit. Wherever it is found it comes from God, and whatever flows from, or is given by him, has inherent in it, as the very law of its being, the lifelike property of fecundity. Men see not, it may be, in the wild and prolific abundance of natural vegetation, how or when the seed is dropped into the ground: they dream not, whilst it is hidden, of that which it shall one day be. A bird of the air may carry all unheeded the source of future life to a distant spot; and, where there was barrenness before, beauty and verdure may spring forth, though by processes all abstract from the ken of man. So it is with the constitution of the land: the Briton, the Roman, the Saxon, and the Norman, have each contributed somewhat to its formation. The rude struggle for freedom left its impress the better civilization of the capital of the world was not without its ameliorating influence with the sea kings and their tribes came in the spirit of enterprize and the elements of enquiry; whilst the mailed conquerors of the country somewhat redeemed the wrongs occasioned by their rapacity in the amenities of chivalry which they introduced, and the greater ecclesiastical knowledge and learning which they brought with them. Though what of right each contributed might for a time have been hidden from sight in the rank masses of coeval corruptions, yet the clearing processes of advancing civilization, whilst they removed that which was less pure, laid bare and gave healthful life to that which was essentially good. The seeds of truth are ever sown by the merciful care and providence of God, and no matter by what hand he sows them they must spring forth and be fruitful in blessing to some one or other of his creatures; and we are now reaping the result of every right principle for which our ancestors, according to their light, or in any measure, contended.

The graphic sketches which Sir Francis gives of an election, the transactions of the Guildhall and the session of the king in Parliament, lead his readers easily and naturally to entertain the just reflections which he makes on the constitution, political and civil, of the country; whilst the great truth is ever presented to our minds, that man, in all the changing and

varied forms of his social existence, has been essentially the same. Though between the costume of one age and the guise of another there may be enough of distinction to show of what different aspects he is capable, there is still sufficient of that which is common to all to establish a common brotherhood between the men of climes and epochs far removed from each other. Whilst it shows the folly of the unthinking, therefore, to despise any phase through which man in his social existence has passed, it betrays, on the other hand, a want of intelligence as to that for which he is fitted and destined to assume the aspect of a bye-gone time, as being more suited to our condition than that which we have. To enforce what we feel upon the subject, we cannot do better than quote from the book before us one of the many beautiful reflections with which it abounds, wherein the author, though in other forms, enunciates the principles which we have ventured to suggest.

"But is there any reason to wonder if the devices of the mortal man, the shadows of a shade, are scen to waste and wane away? Should we sorrow because the stability of the everlasting hills is denied to the fabric raised upon dust and ashes? Must we not confess the truth and submit, without repining, to the wisdom of the dispensation which decrees that when human institutions have once arrived at their fatal term they can never be revived? During the convulsions which alter the level of society, new opinions have been adopted, new habits have been assumed. Young spirits bave arisen confident in their own untaught conceit; whilst ranks of contending champions have sunk into the grave. Diversified as the human countenance is, by feature and expression, the human mind is still more varied by temper, education, rank, position, and intellect. Providence works by eliciting modes of thought, not cyclical but successive; and in which man freely acts, though without the power of controlling their evolution. No era which has once gone by can ever be brought back : individuals are never reproduced: the creatures not merely of the last year, or even of the yesterday, will never more be found together. Never will the same combinations recur, so long as the world endures." "The fitness of the forms possessed by the extinguished policy is utterly lost and the same integrity which resisted the removal of the old land-marks will, as consistently, refuse to disturb the new, within whose boundaries other rights of property have been acquired. Blessed is the protecting hand!"

Now, this is the sound and truthful dealing with the present and the past, so far as moral reflection is concerned, that we need for the morbid spirit of the times has well nigh, on the one hand, emasculated all wise and vigorous thinking on that which has gone, down to the puerilities of a childish mind;

and, on the other, the antagonistic rashness of the age passes by, in its mad haste, whatever of dignity or truth are to be found in that which preceded us. The one is an abuse of the 'imaginative faculty-the other is a contempt of the meditative powers: in every well regulated mind each should have its place, for they are each an attribute of the immortal spirit, by which she recalls the past for wisdom and anticipates the future for strength and consolation; but all becomes confusion and disorder when either is unduly fostered to the prejudice and weakening of the other.

We could have wished, however, as we have before said, to have found somewhat more of the fictions of the middle ages. Much is learnt by contrast. It is oftentimes by the deformity of the lie that the beauty of the truth is made manifest; and the quaint absurdities and monstrous forms of fiction serve to show by what paths and what distance reality has been departed from. It is difficult to suppose a tradition which is not founded on some fact; nevertheless, the forms which popular traditions assume show, in the disfiguring of that fact, how unsafe a vehicle it is for its transmission to society in its positive verity. Say what men will, where these fictions abound proof is given of a dark condition of society: for if there be on the one hand some above their fellows who know the error, there must be on the other a total absence of means by which it may be pointed out, or an absolute want of capacity to receive the explanation; and in this, after all, lies a sturdy obstacle in the way of those, who, in opposition to all that has hitherto been written on the subject, would fain persuade us that the centuries from the seventh to the thirteenth were not dark.

Customs and costumes are able expounders of the social condition of any nation: the legends of popular faith and the fictions of vulgar tradition, of its moral estate. It is by what men do believe, rather than by what they do not, that we find out where they stand in the scale of mental civilization; and we apprehend that, whilst the characteristic of the middle ages was faith, it was a faith in much that was positively false rather than in that which was positively true; and this to such an extent that the amount of error far exceeded that of truth; nor should we be able to comprehend all the moral phenomena of those periods, many of which were certainly most beautiful and good, if we did not ourselves believe that it is in the heart, more than in the mind, that God is both apprehended and manifested; and that, apart from what the corruption of man has made them, there is a safeguard for him in