existed no security of property. The Inquisition had the power of bringing an industrious man before their accursed tribunal, and without confronting him with his accuser, or even telling him the nature of his crime, these priestly judges could sentence him to death, and appropriate his possessions to some religious institution, the members of which prayed for the repose of his soul!!!

To those who are capable of philosophizing on the rise and fall of empires, how ample a field of instruction is afforded by contrasting the present condition of Spain with its former glory and power. When other nations have been advancing in arts and civilization, she has retrograded, and is now scarcely more respectable than during the middle ages.* If Charles the Fifth could rise from his grave, and contemplate the present state of that once mighty empire, and if he were told that the principal

*It is a melancholy truth, that during the late struggle for constitutional liberty, the majority of the Spanish people appeared more inclined to an ecclesiastical tyranny, than a representative government. Even at this time, when the murderer of Riego sits in quiet on the throne, and receives loyal deputations from this beastialized people, the brave adherents of the heroic Mina are subsisting in a strange land, on the charity of a foreign nation.

cities and fortresses of his kingdom were garrisoned by the troops of that nation, whose king he had conquered and captured at Pavia, he would rush back to the tomb in horror and indignation. "Fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens, Gloria Teucrorum."

The history of France, to which the attention of the reader is now directed, presents, in some respects, a less disgusting picture of ignorance and fanaticism than that of Spain. But in an estimate of her pretensions to moral and intellectual greatness, the commendations to which she is justly entitled, are rather of a negative than a positive kind. Those persons, whose knowledge of past times is derived from that confused mixture of fact and fiction, which is contained in historical novels, may perhaps dissent from this opinion; but the calm and judicious observer cannot fail to perceive, that the rank which France occupies in the scale of. nations, is rather to be attributed to her comparative superiority over her contemptible neighbours, than to her own intrinsic merits. It is from the contrast alone, that she appears worthy of admiration and respect. The French are said to be the most vain, conceited, and egotistical nation under the sun; and indeed, it must be confessed, that some of their writers have carried their national pride to a ridi

culous extreme.

But without examining

the reasonableness of this accusation, it cannot be denied, that France has not benefited the human race in proportion to her natural advantages. No country in Europe can equal her in fertility of soil, and temperature of climate; and her maritime position on the two seas afford peculiar facilities for the successful promotion of commercial enterprise. That excellent precept of the Gospel, which teaches, that "unto whom much is given, of him much will be required," applies to nations as well as to individuals, and by this rule, the pretensions by France to moral and intellectual greatness must be estimated. "If," says a writer in the Quarterly Review, "there should be a day on which nations must render up an account of the use they made of the means which nature had confided to them, to what deserts, once unpeopled, could France appeal, and prove by the idiom common there, that the men who inhabit them are her children? On what shores, once heathen, could she say that Christian prayers are uttered in her tongue? Amid what people could she find a monument inscribed with her language, to show that she had increased the number of beings who share the blessings of this world, and multiplied the generations destined to be eternally happy?...... But France is a nation

without an offspring; the curse of sterility is upon her, inflicted by her own selfish luxury. Of all the men who have existed, the French are they who, in proportion to the means which nature and their state of social improvement have confided to them, have contributed the least to promote, and, perhaps, the most to injure,-the general happiness and progress of their species."

There are few persons who feel greater contempt for the morality and politics of the Quarterly Review than the writer of these pages: but, fas est ab hoste doceri. In the preceding extract, though composed in an angry bitterness of spirit, there is much of truth, but not the whole truth: there is an evident suppression of what ought to have been communicated, in which there appears more of the tact and dexterity of a partisan, than the sincere and honest sentiments of an upright mind, anxious to promote the cause of virtue and the interests of the human race. The Reviewer endeavours to persuade his readers that the inferiority of the French, as a nation, is to be ascribed to some inherent viciousness peculiar to, and inseparable from, the people of that country; for it would not have pleased the supporters of this aristocratical Journal, if the real truth had been disclosed, and misgovern

ment, both ecclesiastical as well as political, been held up as the actual cause of the demoralized condition of France. That a wretched system of misrule, both in Church and State, and particularly in the former, has occasioned this backwardness in moral and intellectual improvement, we proceed to show.

The reformed opinions were introduced into France by Calvin, during the reign of Francis the First, to whom he dedicated his work entitled "Christian Institutions." His doctrines: were opposed by severe edicts, but these are to be rather attributed to the intolerance of. the age, than the zeal or piety of the monarch. The character of Francis was widely different from that of his illustrious competitor Charles the Fifth. The latter resisted the Reformation, because he felt a sincere attachment to the old system; but the King of France was a man of gallantry, and the natural liveliness of his temper induced him rather to indulge in the gaieties of the Court, than enter into any tedious discussions on the dry and perplexing points of religious controversy. In the reign of his successor, Henry the Second, the religious wars commenced in France, and continued till the capture of Rochelle by the famous Cardinal Richlieu, in the reign of Louis the Thirteenth. During this period of anarchy,