deep remorse within his soul. We are here reminded of Shakespeare's representation of this monarch, who is made to express a wish of ending his life in a crusade, and who showed his belief in the prophecy which declared that he should die in Jerusalem, a prediction which was certainly not fulfilled in respect to locality, although it was so far verified that he died in the Jerusalem Chamber at the abbey of Westminster. With the idea of reparation in his mind, and turning away from the abbey, where the remains of his royal forefathers had been laid, he chose for the place of his burial the choir of Canterbury, to the north of the shrine, and opposite to the monument of his uncle, whose son and heir he had supplanted. Here, too, we have a noble epitaph, graved in white marble, with the effigies of the king and his consort sculptured in alabaster. On the wall, we still see the stone-carved canopy over the altar, at which, until the time of the Reformation, masses for the soul of King Henry IV. were read.

These two monuments are witnesses of the decline of the medieval Church in England, when everything connected with religion, including the worship of saints and relics, had degenerated into the most monstrous system of abuse, and when, in England more especially, the secular wealth, the luxuriance and love of power among the clergy contributed largely to bring about the downfal of their order. A new epoch was opening to all the different spheres of life, while the earnest longing for emancipation from priestly oppression, and for a return to the orginal and uncontaminated doctrine and Church of Christ, became day by day more strongly marked. The time was drawing near when both high and low would lay aside, their

veneration for a man like Thomas Becket, who had shown a most un-English passion for gaining supreme dominion over the souls and bodies of men, and when the almost smothered remembrance of a purer evangelical age, such as that in which Gregory and Augustine had lived, was again to revive.

In connexion with the period that immediately preceded the great catastrophe which crushed the power of the Romish Church in England, we possess two very remarkable narratives, which, although they differ materially from each other, concur in conveying the impression that the age of sincere enthusiasm for relics and pious pilgrimages to the graves of saints was drawing rapidly to an end. The first of these narratives is a description of the journey of a Bohemian nobleman, named Leo Von Rozmital, the brother-in-law of King George Podiebrad, who, in his visit to the court of Edward IV., also went to the shrine of "our dear Lord" St. Thomas of Canterbury, which, according to the testimony of his literary companion and scribe, was more precious than any in Christendom, in proof of which he minutely describes all its treasures, including the large diamond. He endeavours, with simple credulity, to put his faith in all the the false with which the effrontery of the monks appears literally to have overwhelmed him. The other report occurs in a letter of Erasmus of Rotterdam, in which this celebrated scholar relates his visit in the year 1512, in company with his friend, John Colet, the learned Dean of St. Paul's, to the treasures in the cathedral at Canterbury, describing the shape and nature of the relics which they saw and worshipped, and the conversation which they held together in reference to them,

and which appears to have led them to the conviction that the period of veneration for Thomas Becket was drawing to a close. The final blow was, at length, struck on the 24th of April, 1538, by the despotic order of Henry VIII., when that cunning, but rough-handed prince made use of his right of supremacy, to seize upon the countless treasures of the shrine, and scrupled not to arraign, on a charge of high treason, rebellion, and assumed sanctity, Thomas Becket, the once powerful archbishop of Canterbury, who had, for three centuries and a-half, been regarded by the nation as one of its holiest saints. That which Henry had not ventured to attempt against the shrine of his royal ancestor, Edward the Confessor, whose relics have remained even to our own day within their original repository in the choir of Westminster, he accomplished without let or hindrance at Canterbury; and while no one has ever attempted to desecrate the graves of the Black Prince or of Henry of Lancaster, the vast and magnificent shrine of the martyr-prelate of Canterbury has disappeared, leaving scarcely a trace of its existence, for nothing now remains to show where it once stood beyond a few pieces of the original costly mosaic with which the ground was paved.

The spirit of intolerance has thus left traces of its presence at Canterbury in widely remote ages, and under diametrically opposite conditions. Nothing can be more refreshing than, in the very midst of these evidences of ecclesiastical and secular passions, to meet with an example of the rarest tolerance. When Queen Elizabeth began to give shelter to the Protestants, who were escaping from persecution in France, a small

colony of French refugees, consisting chiefly of poor silk weavers, settled at Canterbury, where there was assigned to them a portion of the extensive crypt, including the spot where once stood the two altars founded by Edward the Black Prince, and not far from the recess in which the bones of the martyr had been laid after the fire and during the building of the new cathedral. Here the refugees celebrated the services of their Church, and here their descendants, who are now reduced to a very small number, still carry on their Presbyterian mode of worship in their own tongue, immediately below the south aisle of the high choir, where the Anglican ritual is observed in all its prescribed formsa noble and touching concurrence—the parallel to which cannot be met with in any other cathedral church of England.

II.

MONKS AND MENDICANT FRIARS.

THE Christian Church, both in the East and West, was, a few centuries after its foundation, materially strengthened by the incorporation of a new order of delegates of its authority, in addition to the various administrative powers which had been developed from the original organization of the hierarchy. This new order had grown out of a natural requirement of the human mind for meditative contemplation; and while this special element became, at an early period, alike intimately blended with the inner being of the two great forms of Christianity, it differed essentially in the two; for while, in the Eastern Church its original character of exclusive, solitary self-contemplation was in time still further developed, until it became personified in the hermits and anchorites of the early ages of Christianity, in the Latin Church it contributed to fortify and accelerate the aggressive element which, from the first, had characterized this form of the faith, which was destined to gain universal ascendancy.

From the time of Benedict of Nursia, the various monkish Orders and monastic Societies have existed much in the same form as they have continued to our own day, adapting themselves to the varying require