profoundly still, when a full rich volume of sound pealed from the organ, and thrilled on the slumberer's ear until his soul was lifted up with holy rapture. Blending with its tranquillizing harmony, swelled a hymn of triumph, chanted by the multitude below. The dreamer had been in his youth a chorister, and although now a zealous disciple of Calvin, he retained an impassioned fondness for church music. Forgetting, in his transport, the elevation of his position, he sprang forward, and fell from the loft towards the nave, the floor of which seemed ever to recede as he approached it. The shock which accompanied the sensation of whirling through interminable space, aroused him, and he discovered that he had glided from his resting spot down a slope, until stopped by some dwarf trees and bushes.

The moon was now riding high in the heavens, and its radiant beams glistening on the forest foliage, speedily recalled him to the recollection of place and circumstance. Yet though perfectly conscious of being awake, he still continued to distinguish the same majestic harmony of many voices, which had formed the closing anthem to the impressive scenes of his singular dream. Rubbing his eyes, and mistrusting the testimony of his senses, he listened in wondering sympathy to a wellremembered hymn, in the singing of which he had often led the Calvinist congregation of Brabant. As the sound seemed to arise from some adjacent hollow, he quitted his rugged couch, and peering over the bushes, found that he had stumbled on the very lip of a precipice, over which he would have fallen, in his troubled visions,

but for the tangled underwood that bristled around it. The platform whereon he stood seemed about fifty feet from the bottom of the ravine. The broken streams of moonlight illuminating portions of the chasm, showed him immediately beneath those from whom the sacred song proceeded. A numerous group of men, women, and children, was collected around an aged man, in whose silver locks and venerable features, he recognized a brother of the persecuted creed-the same in whose hospitality he confided for support and shelter during his intended stay at St. Omer. As his soul responded to the pious and affecting strains of the humble worshippers, he could not help feeling both grieved and indignant, that the followers of the pure and primitive Christian faith should be compelled by monkish tyranny to offer the sacrifice of the contrite heart at an hour and in a situation more appropriate to acts of guilt than of devotion. "Yet it is well," he ejaculated," it is well that there is even in the wilderness, a place where the ark of God may rest unapproached by the profane." The thought had scarcely crossed his brain, when a person who had been stationed on the look out, hastily approached, and gave the alarm to the assembled Calvinists.

"Away! away! my brethren!" shouted the watcher, "the enemies of the Lord are at hand-a Benedictine and a band of troopers are riding down the ravine!"

The meeting began instantaneously to disperse in wild dismay. The women and children crossed the hollow and disappeared among the trees. The men, after

vainly endeavouring to prevail upon their aged pastor to seek safety in flight, rallied around him, resolved at every hazard to shield him from injury or capture—promising, however, at his injunction, to abstain from all needless recrimination, and to resist only when provoked to the uttermost. The moment, however, was at hand, when the long-oppressed Calvinists of the Netherlands found courage to rise against their oppressors. Galled beyond endurance by the contumely and injury they suffered from the dominant church, and almost excluded from the pale of social life by their conscientious opposition to the dogmas of popery, they saw their powerful oppressors invested with the splendours of the Romish ritual, offering up their prayers in gorgeous temples, while they who worshipped the same deity, but according to the forms of a purer and more self-denying faith, were deprived even of the poorest tabernacle, and were necessitated to perform the service of God in woods and solitudes remote from human habitation. Hitherto although with the sense of wrong rankling in their hearts, and zeal, bordering on frenzy, inflaming their minds,-stimulated unceasingly by enthusiastic preachers-strong in numerical force, and doubly formidable from a knowledge of that strength, joined to the complete assurance of mutual fidelity to their cause and to each other-hitherto-saith our Chroniclethese persecuted Christians were alike destitute of organization and design. But there was among them. a fermenting spirit which, like a powder magazine, waited but the contact of a spark to burst forth in wide

and terrible combustion. This fiery agency was now at hand, in the person of him whose singular dream has been narrated, and who was styled Baldwin of Antwerp; although certain Romish Chroniclers have not scrupled to assert that Peregrine La Grange, the daring and eloquent reformer of Valenciennes, was the first to give that impulse to the outraged Calvinists, which in less than a week accomplished the destruction of four hundred churches, and spread consternation throughout Catholic Europe.

L-a, better known to his sect as Baldwin the Preacher, was one of four brothers, the offspring of a bigotted Spaniard, who had married a widow of Antwerp, possessed of some wealth. The widow was a secret but warm convert to Protestantism, and notwithstanding the fear of her husband and the Catholic authorities, she determined to prepare, by suitable precepts, the minds of her sons for the profitable reception of those tenets which she alone believed to be religion "pure and undefiled." The Spaniard was equally solicitous to rear his boys in devout submission to the mandates of the mother church; and for this purpose he took advantage of their ardent disposition for music, and placed them as choristers in the cathedral of Antwerp, where youths derived the benefit of general instruction, and were initiated into matters both of faith and discipline. To counteract the effects of this novi ciate, the zealous mother omitted no opportunity of impressing upon their susceptible memories, such portions of Holy Writ as would, she piously hoped, produce