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would seem, for audacity in battle, ventured on using the same freedom, De la Marck instantly put a check to a jocular practice, which would soon have cleared his table of all the more valuable decorations." Ho! by the spirit of the thunder!" he exclaimed, "those who dare not be men when they face the enemy, must not pretend to be thieves among their friends. What! thou frontless dastard thou-thou who didst wait for opened gate and lowered bridge, when Conrade Horst forced his way over moat and wall, must thou be malapert?-Knit him up to the staunchions of the hall-window ! -He shall beat time with his feet, while we drink a cup to his safe passage."

The doom was scarce sooner pronounced than accomplished; and in a moment the wretch wrestled out his last agonies, suspended from the iron bars. His body still hung there when Quentin and the others entered the hall, and, intercepting the pale moon-beam, threw on the Castle-floor an uncertain shadow, which dubiously, yet fearfully, intimated the nature of the substance that produced it. The Bishop of Liege, Louis of Bourbon, was dragged into the hall of his own palace, by the brutal soldiery. The dishevelled state of his hair, beard, and attire, bore witness to the ill-treatment he had already received; and some of his sacerdotal robes hastily flung over him, appeared to have been put on in scorn and ridicule of his quality and character.

The bearing of the ecclesiastic is noble and impressive; he reproaches De la Marck with his crimes, and enjoins on him contrition and penance.

While Louis of Bourbon proposed these terms, in a tone as decided as if he still occupied his episcopal throne, and as if the usurper kneeled a suppliant at his feet, the tyrant slowly raised himself in his chair; the amazement with which he was at first filled, giving way gradually to rage, until, as the bishop ceased, he looked to Nikkel Blok, and raised his finger, without speaking a word. The ruffian struck, as if he had been doing his office in the common shambles; and the murdered Bishop sunk, without a groan, at the foot of his own episcopal throne.'

The Liegeois, though they were a turbulent race, and had conspired to throw off the easy yoke of the Bishop, were not so far hardened as to tolerate this sight of horror. A tumult arises, of which the result promises to have been the entire extermination of the insurgents by the better armed and more warlike satellites of William, but for the spirited conduct of Quentin, who seizes upon a youth, the natural son of De la Marck, and with drawn dagger, threatens his life unless a stop were put to the imminent massacre. His uniform, that of the Archer-guard, supports his claim to be considered as the envoy of Louis, the ally and protector of the Boar of Ar

dennes, and he succeeds by firmness and intrepidity in with drawing this whole party from the Castle. After some further adventures, he places his fair charge in safety at the court of the Duke of Burgundy.

The remainder of the story turns on the singular determination which was carried into execution by Louis XI. when he voluntarily put himself into the hands of his rival at Peronne. The craft of the French king, with his anxieties, apprehensions, and his various manoeuvres, are admirably detailed; and the struggles between violent emotion, self-interest, and honourable feeling, in the breast of Charles, are powerfully drawn. Philip de Comines, and other leading characters of the Burgundian court, figure conspicuously on the scene. The main narrative, with its various underplots, now becomes too complicated for analysis. In the mean time, Quentin's amour with the Lady of Croye, goes forward amid multiplied difficulties, until her hand is offered by Charles, to any noble adventurer who shall bring him the head of De la Marck, the murderer of the good Bishop of Liege. The battle fought by the allied Burgundians and French against the Liegeois and the Boar of Ardennes, is portrayed with great force and spirit. De la Marck, aware of the efforts that will be made personally against him, changes his usual armour and bearings; but Durward, having been made acquainted, through a communication from Isabelle, with this circumstance, singles him out, and has nearly obtained the victory, when called off by the shrieks of a damsel in the hands of the licentious soldiery. The business, however, is finished by le Balafré, who willingly resigns the lady's hand to his nephew. In this brief sketch, we have, of necessity, passed over a multitude of characters and events; but it would be unfair to the Zingaro, not to record his fate. Having delivered, in the assumed character of a herald, an insulting message from De la Marck to Charles the Bold, he is first baited by dogs, and then hanged, bequeathing his purse and his horse to Quentin.

Art. IV. Remarkable Passages in the Life of William Kiffin: written by Himself, and edited from the Original Manuscript, with Notes and Additions. By William Orme. Small 8vo. pp. 162. Price 5s. 6d. London. 1823.

THE publication of this manuscript memoir is in some mea

sure owing to the appearance of " Peveril of the Peak." It is perhaps the best result of those fascinating but exceptionable productions now known by the name of the Scotch

Novels, that they have indirectly led to the illustration of several interesting periods of English history, by means of the works which have followed in their wake, and partaken the 'gale.' The attentive reader of that work,' says Mr. Orme, referring to the above-mentioned novel, who may deign to cast his eye over the following pages,'

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must be struck with various points of resemblance between its puritanical hero Major Bridgenorth, and the honest and venerable William Kiffin. Both belonged to the same class of religious professors; both made considerable fortunes during the period of civil dudgeon; both exercised their talents in the field, and their gifts in the church; and both were the subjects of heavy domestic misfortunes, involved in religious persecution, or in the calamities of political intrigue. Here, however, I must stop. Bridgenorth is a caricature, the creature of fiction, and designed to ridicule either the profession or the weaknesses of religious persons. Kiffin is a real character, possessing, it is true, a few peculiarities, but imbodying the substantial excellencies of Christianity, which the Author of the Scottish Novels seems little capable of estimating. In this last production, indeed, there is a greater tone of moderation in regard to religion, than in some of his former works. There is an admission, that "his Puritan is faintly traced to his Cameronian"-a poor apology for his unrighteous treatment of the patriotic and persecuted covenanters. The Author of " Peveril" still considers "hypocrisy and enthusiasm" (terms in the vocabulary of the world for the religion of the Bible) as fit food for ridicule and satire. "Yet," he says, "I am sensible of the difficulty of holding fanaticism up to laughter or abhorrence, without using colouring which may give offence to the sincerely worthy and religious. Many things are lawful which are not convenient; and there are many tones of feeling which are too respectable to be insulted, though we do not altogether sympathize with them." If this be not a testimony of homage to truth, it is at least a deference to public feeling; and every step in the return to right thinking and acting ought to be acknowledged with approbation.

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There is some reason to believe,' adds Mr. Orme, that an extensive change in the public opinion respecting the nature of genuine religion, has been silently operating for a considerable time. All the talents are obviously not on the side of infidelity and irreligion. The faith of Christ is not entirely limited to the vulgar and the wretched. It has been adopted in all its peculiarities, and manifested in all its decision, by men of the highest order of intellect, and of the most brilliant parts. It is not so convenient as it once was, to decry seriousness as fanaticism, and religious zeal as madness. It is discovered that a Christian may be a gentleman, and that sourness and grimace have as little connexion with godliness as levity and profaneness. This change in the public mind appears, among other things, in the increased respect which is shewn to puritanical writings-puritanical characters and to what may be called the puritanical age of English history. Even Oliver Cromwell has ceased to be regarded

merely as a hypocrite and a villain, and has found historians and apologists, not only among Dissenters and Whigs, but among Churchmen and Tories.'

There could not be a much more striking proof of this change of public opinion, than the deference which is paid to it by authors of novels and works of fiction. Even in the most exceptionable and perhaps the finest production of the Author of Waverley, Old Mortality, there are concessions made to the piety and heroism of the Cameronians, which distinguish the injustice of the historical novelist from the coarser misrepresentations of party-writers and the ribaldry of the satirist. Such, however, was the character of those times, and such the state of things in our own country in the days of Peveril of the Peak, that it would not perhaps be easy to bring home the charge of stepping beyond the line of truth in the depiction of individual characters. The misrepresentation lies in the sweeping inferences which are drawn from such instances when held up as specimens. I readily grant,' says Mr. Orme, that during the period in which Kiffin lived, ⚫ there were many false pretenders, not a few wild enthusiasts, and some who made gain by godliness.' Many of the Puritans would have been singular and eccentric characters though they had not adopted a religious profession.' We fear that the general character of the age must be allowed to have been that of stormy grandeur, rather than of light and purity; and such spirits as Milton, and Howe, and Hutchinson were upborne above the element of their times, rather than partook of its influence. We should not like to undertake the defence of all the sentiments and doings even of the sincerely religious in that age, and should most assuredly hesitate to subscribe to many of the dogmas of the puritan theology. Our admiration of those olden times is by no means unbounded, nor do we think them to have been better than, these we live in. But, compared with the mass of their countrymen at that period, the party which furnishes the Novelist or the Satirist with his caricature portraits of fanaticism, and which contained but too many pretenders and counterfeits to serve as originals to these portraits, included, unquestionably, by far the larger mass of the wise and good; nor is it possible to hold up their peculiarities to ridicule, without countenancing the ribaldry of the scoffer and the impiety of the profane.

The misrepresentation of the men would be an offence of no further consequence than as it tends to perplex and obscure the page of history, were it not that something much more mportant than the character of any set of individuals or of

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any party, gets misrepresented through them. They are dead and gone, and all their private interests have long been buried in forgetfulness. Whatever be their claims to our veneration as patriots or as divines, we have no further interest in their reputation, than that which, as Englishmen and as Christians, we feel for the wise and good whose names illustrate the annals of our civil and ecclesiastical history. Owen is no more to us than Wicliffe, nor Baxter more than Latimer. Whatever were their errors or their oddities, we have no cause to blush for the one, nor to refrain from a smile at the other. The principles which we hold in common with the early Puritans and Nonconformists, ally us as nearly, in feeling and in fact, to Hooker, to Reynolds, and to Leighton, with whom they are now eternally associated. Were they alive at this moment, retaining all the notions of their age, it would be hard to say from which we should find ourselves differing the more widely. In many things,' as Mr. Orme justly remarks, we do not sympathize with the men of the seventeenth century; nor will the men of the twentieth, perhaps, sympathize with us.'. But even if we could consent to go further than this, and give up the professors' of that age to the pens of Clarendon and of Butler, as a set altogether of hypocrites and fanatics, our objection would not be in the slightest degree lessened to the ludicrous exhibition of their peculiarities as religionists. In all such representations, religion itself must be made to supply the point of the jest. There is nothing ludicrous in hypocrisy; it is in itself a thing simply hateful. What it is, then, that is amusing in these suspected or alleged hypocrites? It must be the piety which they affected. Take away their scripture phrases and religious habits, and you destroy the joke. They formed, it is said, a caricature of religion. Be it so; what other purpose can the exhibition of a caricature answer, than the casting ridicule on the original? There must be a resemblance, to constitute it a caricature: there must have been something in these men very like religion, to make their hypocrisy or enthusiasm pass for it. Then how is it possible to hold them up to ridicule without connecting the burlesque with religion itself? Let it not be said, that it was they who rendered religion ludicrous. It is not the fact. Their habits were the habits of the times; and however quaint, or affected, or precise they may seem to us, they were no more ridiculous in the estimation of their contemporaries, except to those who scoffed at the Scriptures and the religion of the Bible itself, than Wicliffe's translation of the Bible was ridiculous in the age of Richard II., or than the costume of our great grandmothers was in the days of Queen Anne. The contrast which VOL. XX. N. S. E

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