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be merry, I muse what a God's name you meane heere still thus fondly to tarrie.' After he had a while quietlie heard her, with a cheerfull countenance he said unto her; I pray thee good Mrs Alice tell me one thing.' What is that?' (quoth she) Is not this house, quoth he, as nigh heaven as myne own? To whome she after her accustomed homelie fashion not likinge suche talke, answered: Tille-valle, tille-valle.' How say you, Mrs Alice, is it not soe?' quoth he, Bone Deus, bone Deus, Man, will this geare never be leaft?' quoth she, Well then, Mistriss Alice, if it be soe, quoth hee, it is verie well; for I see no great cause why I should muche joy in my gaie house, or in anie thinge thearunto belonginge, when if I should but seaven yeeres lie buried under the ground, and then arise and come thither againe, I should not faile to finde some thearin that would bid me get me out of dores, and tell me it weare none of mine. What cause have I then to like such an house as would so soon forget his master? Soe her perswasions moved him but little.

"Soe remained Sir Thomas More in the Tower more then a weeke after his judgment. From whence the daie before he suffered he sent his shirt of haire, not willing to have it seene, to my wife his deerlie beloved daughter, and a letter written with a cole, conteined in the foresaid booke of his workes, expressinge the fervent desire he had to suffer on the morrow in these wordes followeinge: I comber you, good Margaret, much, but I would be sory if it should be anie longer then to morrow. For it is Sainct Thomas even and the Utas of St. Peeter: and therfore to morrow longe I to goe to God; it weare a daie verie meet and convenient for me. Deere Megg, I never liked your manner towards me better then when you kissed me last. For I like when daughterlie love and deere charitie hath noe leasure to look to worldlie courtesie.' And soe uppon the next morrowe, Tuesdaie, beinge St. Thomas his eve and the Utas of Saincte Peeter, in the yeer of our Lord 1535, accordinge as he in his letter the daie before had wished, earlie in the morninge came to him Sir Thomas Pope, his singular good freinde, on message from the Kinge and counsaile that he should the same daie be fore nine of the clock in the morninge suffer deathe, and that therfore he should forthwith prepare himself thearto. Mr. Pope, quoth Sir Thomas More, for your good tidings I hartelie thanke you. I have been alwaies muche bounden to the Kinge's High nes for the benefites and honours that he hath still from time to time most bountifullye heaped uppon me; and yet more bounden am I to his Grace for puttinge me into this place wheare I have had convenient time and space to have remembrance of my end. And soe, God helpe me, most of all, Mr. Pope, am I bounden to his Highnes, VOL. IV.

that it pleaseth him so shortlie to ridd me from the miseries of this wretched world, and therfore will I not faile earnestlie to praie for his Grace bothe heere and allsoe in the worlde to come.' The King's pleasure is farther, quoth Mr. Pope, that at your execution you shall not use manie wordes. ⚫ Mr Pope, quoth he, you doe well to give me warninge of his Grace's pleasure, for otherwise at that time had I purposed somewhat to have spoken, but of noe matter whearwith his Grace or any should have had cause to be offended. Nevertheless, whatsoever I intended, I am readie obedientlie to conforme my selfe to his Grace's commandement; and I beseeche you, good Mr. Pope, to be a meane to his Highnes that my daughter Margaret maie be at my buriall.' The Kinge is content allreadie, quoth Mr. Pope, that your wife and childeren and other your freinds shall have libertie to be present thearat. Oh how muche behold inge then, said Sir Thomas More, am I unto his Grace, that unto my poore buriall vouchsafethe to have soe gratious consideracion!' Whearwithall Mr Pope, takeinge his leave, could not refraine from weepinge. Which Sir Thomas More perceavinge comforted him in this wise. Quiet your selfe, good Mr. Pope, and be not discomforted: for I trust that we shall once in heaven see each other full merrilie, where we shall be sure to live and love togeather in joyfull bliss eternallie.' Uppon whose departure, Sir Thomas More, as one that had binne invited to some solemn feast, chaunged himselfe into his best apparrell. Which Mr. Lieutenant espieing advised him to put it of, sayeinge, that he that should have it was but a javell. What, Mr. Lieutenant, quothe he, shall I account him a javell that shall doe me this daie soe singuler a benefit? Naie, I assure you, weare it cloath of gold, I should thinke it well bestowed on him, as Sainct Cyprian did, who gave his executioner thirtie peeces of gold.' And albeit, at length, he, through Mr. Lieuten ant's importunate persuasion, altered his apparrell, yet, after the example of the holie Martyr Sainct Cyprian, did he, of that little money that was left him, send an angell of gold to his executioner. And soe was he by Mr. Lieutenant brought out of the Tower to the place of execution. Wheare goinge up the skaffold, which was soe weake that it was readie to fall, he saide merrilie to the Lieutenant, I praie you see me up safe, and for my comminge downe let me shift for my selfe.' Then desired he all the people thearabout to praie for him, and to beare witness with him that he should theare suffer deathe in and for the faithe of the Catholicke Churche. Which donne he kneeled downe, and after his prayers saide, turned to the executioner with a cheerfull countenance, and said unto him, Plucke up thy spirits, man, and be not affraide to doe thine office: my neck is verie short, take heede therfore thou strike not awrie for

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savinge of thine honestie.' Soe passed Sir Thomas More out of this world to God uppon the verie same daie which he most desired. Soone after his deathe came intelligence thearof to the Emperor Charles. Whearuppon he sent for Sir Thomas Eliott, our English Embassadour, and said to him; My Lord Embassadour, we understande that the Kinge your master hath put his faithfull servant and grave councellor Sir Thomas More to deathe.' Whearuppon Sir Thomas Eliott answeared, that he understoode nothing thearof. Well, saide the Emperor, it is too true: and this will we saie, that had we binne master of such a

servant, of whose dooings ourselves have had

these manie yeers noe small experience, we would rather have lost the best cittie of our dominions, than have lost such a worthie Councellor. Which matter was by the same Sir Thomas Eliott to my selfe, to my wife, to Mr. Clement and his wife, to Mr. John Heywood and his wife, and unto divers others his freindes accordinglie reported."

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WE wish to call the attention of our readers to this production, not because we think that there is any thing very formidable in its mischief, but because it speaks the sentiments and opinions of a Junto whose power, happily for this country, is on the decay, and ought never again to be permitted to lift its head. Fatal, indeed, might have been the influence of these conjurated wits and wise-men, on the patriotism and the religion of Britons, had there been in the country as bitter a disaffection to the Government, and as deep rooted an infidelity respecting the Christian Faith, as they had presumed upon, in their utter ignorance of the spirit of the age. They have not now even the cold consolation of distant hope. They feel that their reign is over yet they are loth to part either with the shibboleth of their party, or the insignia of their power, and foolishly continue to assume the same tyrannical demeanour that they wore in the splendour of their usurpation, even now, when they have been by the voice of the country

dethroned.

That country feels and acknowledges, that there is something in the human

mind better than mere talents. That something is-wisdom. And when the people call to mind the paltry and cowardly counsels of these men of talents-their insensibility to the imperishable glories of England-their fawning adulation of despotism and despot-their niggardly praises, or their insidious attacks on time-hallowed establishments; and, above all, their sneaking, ignorant, and malignant sneers, at the religion in which we have our being-they laugh to scorn the vaunted talents of the Conspiracy, and look back with mixed self-congratulation and self-reproach to the days of their delusion, when some of them might have allowed themselves to be worked up into a causeless terror of the final overthrow of their country's liberties.

In vain, however, do these men of talents try to sustain their former arrogance. In spite of their blustering, they are crest-fallen,-sometimes, in the midst of their angriest invectives, there is a "voice of weeping heard, and loud lament;" they eat their very hearts at the spectacle of their country's unparalelled glory-they cry on us with bitter impatience to believe ourselves ruined, and wax more wroth at the scorn that replies to their folly

they insult the ashes of those great men whose counsels have saved Europe from falling back centuries of civilization in the blastment of despotismthey break in with unhallowed violence upon the awful solitude of their afflicted King-and that they may sacrilegiously lay hands on his grey hairs, they falsely, basely, and hypocritically accuse him of having neglected the true interests of that religion which they themselves have for so many years been endeavouring to destroy.

In their defence of the character of Bishop Watson, there is an ample display of all those qualities of mind and heart, which have at last awakened against the Edinburgh Review an almost universal feeling of contempt and indignation. It is easy to see the reason of all this useless zeal in the defence of a man, who, it is well known, regarded them with aversion and abhorrence. We look in vain in the dull and fretful pages of this irritable and disappointed Reviewer, for one trace of a lofty and virtuous indignation; he is vexed, and peevish, and out of temper-and wrecks his impotent an

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ger on every one that comes in his way; while, instead of a genial and generous strain of admiration for the man whom he pretends to eulogise, he keeps incessantly pouring out reproaches against those, compared with whom, either in virtue or in talents, he, be he who he may, would at once be" diminished to his head." Reflecting persons are not thus to be deceived. This writer does not wear the air of sincerity and truth. He does not care one iota about the character of the Bishop of Landaff-he assumes an appearance of veneration for that great man, that he may indulge his spleen against a man far greater still, and he drivels out his impotent eulogies on Richard Watson, that he may mingle them with still more impotent execrations on William Pitt.

When he asserts that Pitt had no doubts of the orthodoxy of Watson, and thought him in all respects worthy of promotion to a richer See, but that he was afraid to offend his Sovereign, lest he might lose his place, and therefore, in deference to what is called the prejudices of that Sovereign, sacrificed the duty he owed to the interests of religion,-he asserts what he knew to be false. Pitt never did, and never could think Watson a fit person to be raised to the very highest dignities of the church. That divine had, beyond all bounds of reason, at one time given up his mind to an admiration of the French Revolution-a revolution which at no period was such as to demand the unqualified praise of a minister of our religion. Though he afterwards abjured his faith in the revolutionary creed, there still remained in his political opinions much of the ancient leaven-he was a man who submitted impatiently to constituted authority in others, though most ambitious to possess it in himself-he saw no especial merit in the establishment of the church of England, and felt for it no especial veneration-and though this Reviewer says, with a most laughable simplicity, that "he never was a party-man," it is reluctantly admitted by his best friends, that he was in all temporal things ambitious overmuch, while it was, and is, notorious to the whole world, that he often interfered with mean party-politics in a way highly unbecoming his sacred profession.-Pitt was right in thinking, that moderation, temper,

suavity, meekness, and Christian humility, are qualities essential in the character of that churchman who sits on the Episcopal bench. He did not think, that high stations in the church establishment were to be demanded as a right-claimed as a possession-seized on as a prey. He thought, and he thought justly, that with all his talents, erudition, and virtues, Richard Watson was not entitled to higher promotion than he enjoyed.

That this view of Bishop Watson's character was a just one, his Memoirs have shewn to all the world. It is a gross absurdity to maintain, that men are to be made bishops solely on the score of talents. It is still more absurd to maintain, that if a man of talents has been made a bishop, it is wicked and infamous not to continue to promote him to the highest bishoprick of all. This Reviewer could not have more dolorously whined over the fate of Watson, or more bitterly vituperated Pitt, though the minister had left the theologian to pine away in poverty and oblivion. He, and others of his Whig friends, seem most tenderly alive to their own interests and those of their party. The good things of this life, contrary to the ordinary laws of nature, acquire magnitude in proportion to their distance, and offices of trust and honour, in church and state, assume to them a more magnificent and overshadowing grandeur in the hopeless distance of an everlasting perspective. It is a sure way of making themselves and their friends ridiculous, to be constantly deploring the injustice of ministers to the great men of their party; and there cannot be a more ludicrous instance of such folly, than this of holding up to commiseration the late Bishop of Landaff as a neglected man, cruelly suffered to drag out his existence with only five thousand a year of church preferment. It can but excite laughter to hear such complaints uttered for the sake of a man who wanted only those highest of all honours which he did not deserve, and who can be said to have been disappointed only because his arrogance was boundless and his ambition insatiable.

We ought almost to beg our readers' pardon for thus exposing the self-evident folly of all such accusations; but we wished to direct their attention to the pitiful weapons with

which this pitiful person has tried to wound the character of William Pitt. At this time of day, such imbecile attacks move something more than derision. We cannot bear to see one of the greatest intellects the world has ever produced treated in this way, even by an implacable enemy. If the giant statue is to be moved from its pedestal, it cannot be by a pigmy's hand. The voice of England has decreed that Pitt was a great man in his failings as in his strength; and it is now expected, by the people of England, that his character shall be spoken of, even by his enemies, with such a tone of feeling as the illustrious dead demand from all worthy to be their compatriots. In our blame of the great spirits who have left us, it is fitting that we hold in memory the imperishable impression which their characters have left on the mind of the country. We are unworthy of being sons of that country, if we disturb the awful repose of its veneration for the dead, by words which would have been condemned as splenetic and vile had they been applied to the living. It is one of the finest things in the character of our people, that they always think and feel truly of the great men who have died in their country's service. Pitt so died; and if his conduct is to be arraigned, let it be in a way unknown to this Reviewer, with some portion of that magnificence of language, and elevation of sentiment, that clothed the son of Chatham with perpetual power; let it be with all the freedom, but, at the same time, with all the dignity, of one who feels what noble ashes lie every where spread around his feet.

But we have a few words to say of more solemn import; and we ask, what manner of man he must be, who can think of what his Sovereign now is, and yet fears not to speak of him with bitterness and insult. We will not disgrace our pages with the dark disloyalty of this despiser of his King. But we will tell him, that he knows nothing of the spirit that reigns in this island, if he expects any other reward for that disloyalty than universal contempt and indignation. The Edinburgh Review is, we believe, the only journal of any pretensions to good feeling or principle that has spoken disrespectfully of the King; yet they, forsooth, are all true lovers of a limited monarchy. It

is with their loyalty as with their religion. They pretend to fear God and to honour the king; yet for twenty years have they been insidiously attacking Christianity, and they have not been on this, and many former instances of still greater atrocity, ashamed sneeringly to insult their Sovereign, now that his crown is laid by, and his head strewed with the dust and ashes of affliction. That grand principle is admitted in its full force by all, of calling to a strict account the character of the kings of England when death has laid them side by side with their subjects. But we must not antedate our King's death that we may clutch the privilege of dissecting his life. It is well that kings should know that posterity will judge them with stern impartiality. We, who are free men, will send our free thoughts down into the grave. But we think not of this our privilege of free men, till death puts it into our hands, and then we use it with a solemn awe and a lofty compunction. But this man snatches it as a right which he impatiently thinks has been too long withheld--he frets because his Sovereign yet lives-he chides the tardy tomb that will not relax "its ponderous and marble jaws,' and he angrily snatches, as it were out of the hand of nature, that privilege of condemnation which she would grant only when its object is a lump of earth. No genuine Briton would, like this Reviewer, suppose the King dead, on a fiction, that he might calumniate his memory. In other similar cases death calms anger, and often elevates it into a feeling that is sublime ; but here the reviler seats himself within the shadow of the grave, that under its protection he may rail in safety against the human being whom it has entombed. This is a sight which the people of Britain will not calmly endure.

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Having thus meanly calumniated a great dead statesman, and cruelly insulted his afflicted King, it is somewhat startling to hear this man advocating the cause of Christianity, and lamenting the untoward worldly lot of its successful champions.

Risum teneatis amici ?

An infidel writer, in an infidel Review, with a grave face, and in the dullest of all possible words, accuses the King and his Ministers of having neglected the interests of the only true religion. But we will ask him,

and his coadjutors and abettors, if the late Bishop of Landaff deserved honour and reward for his defence of Christianity (and he deserved and received it too), what do the infidel writers in the Edinburgh Review deserve for the twenty years warfare they have been waging against that same Christianity? This is a subject on which they ought not to open their mouths, for they open them but to confound themselves, and better to remain dumb for ever, than thus blindly to call down shame and punishment on their own degraded heads. They talk of Gibbon as having been "the most effectual" enemy of the Christian faith, and hypocritically eulogise Watson as his triumphant antagonist. They themselves, without any of Gibbon's eloquence or erudition, possess all his disbelief, and all his insidious malignity; and if Watson is worthy of all good men's reverence for having disarmed Gibbon, and blunted the edge of his weapons, they are deserving of all good men's hate for having picked up those weap ons, tried to restore their edge, and wielded them with a determined, though a feeble hostility.

But this writer, with all his affected zeal for Christianity, is, after all, not quite comfortable in the idea of being thought a Christian. And he lets us know, that if Christianity can only be attacked in a calm, quiet, gentlemanly, philosophical manner, it is quite allowable to do so; as if it were a question of good manners, courtesy, and decorum, rather than one affecting the eternal happiness of the human soul.

"To attack," says he," by ribaldry, or with virulence, or before the multitude, what millions of our fellow creatures believe, and hold sacred as well as dear, is beyond all question a serious offence, and the law punishes it as such. But to investigate reigious questions as philosophers, calmly and seriously, with the anxiety of their high importance, and the diffidence which their intricacy prescribes, is not only allowable but meritorious; and if the conscientious inquirer is led by the light of his under standing TO A CONCLUSION DIFFERENT FROM THAT OF THE COMMUNITY, he may still, we should think, in many cases PROMULGATE IT TO THE PHILOSOPHICAL WORLD," &c.

The meaning of all this is plain enough the Edinburgh Reviewer wishes to stand well with his infidel

friends, and, if possible, with his own inconsistent infidel self; and has, therefore, not scrupled to give the name of serious, anxious, conscientious, philosophical doubts, to the indecent, sneering, insidious, and malignant attacks of Gibbon, whose mind, whenever he spoke of Christianity, fell into melancholy degradation; and what is, if possible, still more barefaced, he has applied the same language of commendation to the feeble and feverish scepticism of the Edinburgh Review. The time is gone by when the reputa tion of being a philosopher could be acquired by disbelieving Christianity. The truth of Christianity is established; and none but weak or wicked persons would in these days seek to revive the long-exploded, and often refuted fooleries, misnamed arguments, by which soi-disant philosophers once strove to effect its overthrow. Had the Edinburgh Reviewers been high-souled and melancholy sceptics; preyed on in the solitude of meditation by fears that rose up from, and darkly overshadowed, the grave; had they shewn themselves to mourn over and deplore the curse of their own incurable infidelity; had they thought and spoken in the spirit of that religion whose divine origin was yet doubted by their reason; had they envied the happiness of the true believer, and expressed their own doubts, not in order to create or increase those of others, but if possible to obtain relief from the direful weight of darkness that loaded their own souls, then might we have read their thoughts with a profound commiseration, extended to them not only forgiveness but sympathy, and acknowledged them to have had the feelings, if not the faith of Christians. But conscience tells them that such is not the nature of their scepticism. And when one of their number now dares to insinuate that it is so, he is met at once with an indignant denial from the whole Christian population of the land.— There is nothing more shocking in their infidelity than its levity, except it be its ignorance. We may as unsuccessfully look throughout their writings for one lofty sentiment in their scepticism, as for one trace of knowledge of the history or evidence of Divine Revelation. They want scholarship sufficient to enable them to pass for decent infidels-they

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