man who cleaned the plate and waited upon them was instructed to tell his master that the dressing-bell had rung: housemaids came in to tidy the room; windows were opened to renew the air: the poor rector could only retire and do as he was bid. How Anne had managed all her life to get her own way in everything is more than I can explain. It was a very calm, persistent, commonplace way, but every one gave in to it. And so it happened that as soon as Jack was her husband, Anne expected that he was to change altogether; see with her pink, watery eyes; care for the things she cared for; and be content henceforth with her mild aspirations after county society in this world, and a good position in the next. Anne imagined, in some vague manner, that these were both good things to be worked out together by punctuality on Sundays, family prayer, a certain amount of attention to their neighbours (varying, of course, with the position of the persons in question), and due regard for the decencies of life. To see her rustling into church in her long silk dress and French bonnet, with her smooth bands of hair, the slender hands neatly gloved, and the prayer-book, hymn-book, pocket-handkerchief, and smelling-bottle, all her little phylacteries in their places, was an example to the neighbourhood. To the vulgar Christians straggling in from the lodging-houses and the town, and displaying their flyaway hats or highly-pomatumed heads of hair; to the little charity children, gaping at her over the wooden gallery; to St. Mary Magdalene up in the window, with her tangled locks; to Mrs. Coote herself, who always came in late, with her four little girls tumbling over her dress and shuffling after her; not to mention Trevithic himself, up in his feading desk, leaning back in his chair. For the last six months, in the excitement of his presence, in the disturbance of her usual equable frame of mind, it was scarcely the real Anne Bellingham he had known, or, maybe perhaps, it was the real woman stirred out of her Philistinism by the great tender hand of nature and the wonderful inspiration of love. Now, day by day her old ways began to grow upon her. Jack had not been married three weeks before a sort of terror began quietly to overwhelm him, a terror of his wife's genteel infallibility. As for Anne, she had got what she wanted; she had cried for the moon, and it was hers; and she, too, began almost immediately to feel that now she had got it she did not know what to do with it exactly. She wanted it to turn the other way, and it wouldn't go, and to rise at the same hour, and it seemed to change day by day on purpose to vex her.

And then she cried again, poor woman; but her tears were of little avail. I suppose Jack was very much to blame, and certainly at this time his popularity declined a little, and people shrugged their shoulders and said he was a lucky young fellow to get a pretty girl and a good living and fifteen thousand pounds in one morning, and that he had feathered his nest well. And so he had, poor fellow, only too well, for to be sunk in a moral feather-bed is not the most enviable of fates to an active-minded man of six or seven and twenty.

The second morning after their return Anne had dragged him out to

her favourite lilac-tree bench upon the height in the garden, from whence you can see all the freshness of the morning brightening from bay to bay green, close at hand, salt wave and more green down below, busy life on land, and a flitting, drifting, white-sailed life upon the water. As Trevithic looked at it all with a momentary admiration, his wife said,—

"Isn't it much nicer to be up here with me, John, than down in those horrid lodgings in the town?"

And John laughed, and said, Yes, the air was very delicious."

"You needn't have worked so hard at that draining if you had been living up here," Anne went on, quite unconsciously. "I do believe one might live for ever in this place and never get any harm from those miserable places. I hear there is small-pox in Mark's Alley. Promise me, dear, that you will not go near them."

now.

"I am afraid I must go if they want me," said John.

"No, dearest," Anne said gently.

It would be wrong of you to go. small-pox."

"You have to think of me first

Papa and I have never had the

Trevithic didn't answer. As his wife spoke, something else spoko too. The little boats glittered and scudded on; the whole sight was as sweet and prosperous as it had been a minute before; but he was not looking at it any more; a strange new feeling had seized hold of him, a devil of sudden growth, and Trevithic was so little used to self-contemplation and inner experience, that it shocked him and frightened him to find himself standing there calmly talking to his wife, without any quarrel angry in his heart, without any separation parted from her. "Anne and I could not be farther apart at this instant," thought John, "if I were at the other side of that sea, and she standing here all alone."

66

What is the matter ?" said poor Anne, affectionately, brushing a little thread off his coat.

"Can't you understand?" said he, drawing away.

"Understand?" Anne repeated. "I know that you are naughty, and want to do what you must not think of."

"I thought that when I married you, you cared for the things that I care about," cried poor John, exasperated by her playfulness, "and understood that a man must do his business in life, and that marriage does not absolve him from every other duty. I thought you cared—you said you did-for the poor people in trouble down there. Don't make it difficult for me to go to them, dear."

"No, dear John. I could not possibly allow it," said his wife, decidedly. "You are not a doctor; it is not your business to nurse small-pox patients. Papa never thinks of going where there is infection."

"My dear Anne," said John, fairly out of temper, "nobody ever thought your father had done his duty by the place, and you must allow your husband to go his own way, and not interfere any more."

"It is very, very wrong of you, John, to say such things," said Anne,

flushing, and speaking very slowly and gently. "You forget yourself and me too, I think, when you speak so coarsely. You should begin your reforms at home, and learn to control your temper before you go and preach to people with dreadful illnesses. They cannot possibly want you, or be in a fit state to be visited."

If Anne had only lost her temper, flared up at him, talked nonsense, he could have borne it better, but there she stood, quiet, composed, infinitely his superior in her perfect self-possession. Jack left her all ashamed of himself, in a fume and a fury, as he strode down into the

town.

The small-pox turned out to be a false alarm, spread by some ingenious parishioners who wished for relief and who greatly disliked the visits of the excellent district ladies, and the matter was compromised. But that afternoon Miss Triquett, meeting John in the street, gave a penetrating and searching glance into his face. He looked out of spirits. Miss Triquett noticed it directly, and her heart, which had been so newhat hardened against him, melted at once.

Jack and his wife made it up. Anne relented, and something of her better self brought her to meet him half-way. Once more the strange accustomed feeling came to him, on Sundays especially. Old Billy Hunsden came cloppetting into church just as usual. There was the clerk, with his toothless old warble joining in with the chirp of the charity-school children. The three rows of grinning little faces were peering at him from the organloft. There was the empty bench at the top, where the mistress sat throned in state; the marble rolled down in the middle of the second lesson, with all the children looking preternaturally innocent and as if they did not hear the noise; the old patches of colour were darting upon the pulpit cushion from St. Mary Magdalene's red scarf in the east window. These are all small things, but they had taken possession of my hero, John, one afternoon, who was preaching away the first Sunday after he had come back from his wedding-trip, hardly knowing what he said, but conscious of Anne's wistful gaze from the rectory pew, and of the curious eyes of all the old women in the free-seats, who dearly love a timely word, and who had made up their minds to be stirred up that Sunday. It was not a bad sermon, but it was of things neither the preacher nor his congregation cared to hear very much.

609

The Satirists of the Reformation.

SOME difference of opinion has always existed amongst men of letters as to the importance which ought to be attached to the work done by satire in the world's history. Mr. Hallam was inclined, we think, to underrate it; which is the more remarkable since his own generation afforded a memorable instance of its influence. Not men of literature only, but the gravest politicians of both sides, were agreed that Béranger did more to overthrow the Bourbons than any other single Frenchman. And Béranger's simple instrument was, as he says himself, satire chantée; he did his work solely by satirical song. The poet to whom he is oftenest compared, Burns, had not the stimulant of a revolution to give his wit a direction so thoroughly political. Nevertheless, Burns too produced a distinct social effect by a similar exercise of his talent. He helped to make Scotch fanaticism weak, by making it ludicrous; and consigned "Holy Willie " and his comrades to the same ridiculous list in which Béranger placed the Jesuits of Charles Dix. Satire, it would seem, supplies an element which is necessary to the complete success of any historical movement. It enlists the worldly part of mankind in a cause, and makes them co-operate with the enthusiasts. It carries great questions into people's hours of amusement, and associates them with fun and hilarity. It represents, essentially, the common-sense view of affairs; and thus acts as a check even on the extravagances of its own side. Accordingly, we hardly know a period of importance in the records of the race which has not left us some specimens of the satirical art. Dig where we will, satirical weapons are found; and their shape and make throw a valuable light on the generations which used them. The loss of Aristophanes would have involved the loss of some of the most striking qualities of the Greek language, and of a thousand instructive details of Athenian life. The loss of Béranger would involve the loss of some of the most classic French that has been written since the days of La Fontaine and Racine; and would blot out a chapter in the history of Parisian opinion and Parisian manners.

The satirists of whom we are now to speak are less known than any. For the most part they wrote in Latin, and the modern Latin writers of Europe hang suspended between the ancient and modern worlds without belonging to either. Nevertheless, there are symptoms that the literary character of the Reformation is now recognized more amply than it used to be, of which Mr. Secbohm's late volume is one. The popular books on the subject make little account except of the preachers,-who, indeed, are usually spoken of as the Reformers proper. But before the preachers could do their work at all, the way had been prepared for them by scholars

and men of letters, humorists and wits. Reuchlin, Erasmus, Ulric von Hutten, Rabelais, Sir David Lindsay, and Buchanan,-these men and their friends were earlier in the field than the Luthers, Calvins, and Knoxes, and were of no less value in their own part of the fight. They supplied the ideas of the great revolution, and disseminated them amongst the middle and upper classes by whom it was made. They prevented it from becoming a mere mob movement, which must have destroyed civilization, and led to a reaction tenfold worse than that which actually took place. Nor do we think it of vital consequence that some of them, like Erasmus and our own More, never left the ancient Church at all. Their spirit did not the less work whether in the modification of the old institution, or the formation of the new. Rabelais, for instance, did his share of the business through the agency of successive generations. He was an ancestor of Molière, who was an ancestor of Béranger; and though France remains nominally Roman Catholic, its Catholicism is very different from what it would have been but for the wholesome Rabelaisian inspiration. And so with the good Erasmus. He detested schism, and every other kind of disorder. He was elderly and gouty when the stormy part of the Reformation began. He died in unity with the Holy See, and very much in bad odour with Luther and his friends. But not a grain of his Attic salt was lost to the cause of improvement; and the memory of his priestly character in the Church has long been merged in that of his higher character as a priest of letters. He was a scholar by nature; he was a priest only by accident. tonsure is altogether hidden by his laurel.

His

Of the life of Erasmus a sketch was given in this Magazine some time ago, but our notice of his works was necessarily casual and brief. We do not disparage him by calling him a satirist, for comedy was one of the elements in which he lived; and a thousand jets of playful satire break out through the voluminous pages of his stately folios. His satire is of the Horatian rather than the Juvenalian school; pleasant, mirthful, pungent, rather than ferocious and biting. His predominant idea is to draw a contrast between the simple holiness of primitive Christianity and the corrupt fabric of his own time; and he points the contrast by humorous little delineations of contemporary theologians and monks, and humorous little hits at their pedantry, ignorance, and vices. It is characteristic of Erasmus that he did not write professed satires. He mixed his satire, like a leaven, with serious discussion or apparently harmless comedy. Thus, in the dedication of his edition of Jerome, he says "We kiss the old shoes and dirty handkerchiefs of the saints, and we neglect their books, which are the more holy and valuable relics. We lock up their shirts and clothes in cabinets adorned with jewels . . . and leave their writings to mouldiness and vermin." And in the Encomium Moriæ, or Praise of Folly, which he wrote in London after his visit to Italy-about 1508-he does not come to ecclesiastical abuses until he has run over many other kinds of human absurdity. It is then, with a