such was her conduct and disposition that he became so after it.

The king had proposed for the elder sister, Blanche la Belle, and her brother had acceded to the proposal; he afterwards violated the contract, and caused the name of his younger sister, Marguerite, then a child, to be fraudulently inserted in the articles. Edward resented this duplicity as might have been expected of him. A fierce war immediately ensued, and it was not till the year 1298, that any pacific arrangement took place between Edward and the brother of Blanche. The treaty was then renewed for Marguerite, who had grown up in the mean'time.' She was married to Edward 8th September, 1299, when she was in her seventeenth year.'-p. 210. He left her a few days afterwards to proceed to Scotland.

During the Scottish wars, Marguerite followed the camp of Edward, and kept court in one of the northern counties. Her beautiful sister Blanche, Duchess of Austria, died in 1305; and Edward commanded prayers to be said for her soul by the Archbishop of Canterbury; because she was the dear sister of his 'beloved consort, Queen Marguerite.' The king,' says Miss Strickland, certainly bore no malice for the perfidy of his former 'love, doubtless being convinced (that) he had changed for the 'better."

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The life of Marguerite appears to have been passed in tempering the somewhat stern rule of her husband, and in deeds of private beneficence and mercy. After his death she lived in retirement, spending her magnificent dower in acts of charity, and in the encouragement of historians and architects. She was the first Queen of England who bore her arms with those of her husband in one scutcheon. The chronicles of England record no fault or folly of Queen Marguerite. Nothing exists to contradict the assertion of Piers Langtoft, that she was good withouten 'lack, and a worthy successor to Eleanor of Castile.'

The epithet of Longshanks' appears to have been a soubriquet bestowed on Edward by the Scots at the siege of Berwick; and to have been by no means warranted by his personal appearance; since, on the opening of his sarcophagus in Westminster Abbey, his body was found to be of fine and just proportions, and his statue (stature) from skull to heel, six feet two inches.

Might not the name of Longshanks be intended as a sort of metaphorical allusion to the great rapidity of his movements?

We have noticed, en passant, some inaccuracies. For instance, we are told that Eleanor of Provence was married to Henry the Third on the 4th of January, 1236, and afterwards, that her coronation was appointed to take place on the feast of St. Fabian and St. Sebastian, six days only after the bridal, being the 20th ' of January.'-Vol. ii. p. 82. Either the former date should be

VOL. VIII.

M

the 14th, or the latter the 10th of January; or else it should be sixteen days after, &c.

Again, we are told in the life of Marguerite of France (vol. ii. p. 210), that she was married to Edward the First in her seventeenth year; and afterwards (p. 222), that her marriage took place in her eighteenth year. We point out these things not for the purpose of finding fault, but that they may be corrected in the subsequent editions to which we hope the work will reach.

Miss Strickland appears to have executed her task in a very creditable manner, and with great impartiality. Her work is just what the title expresses-Lives of the Queens of England-simply. The history of literature, art, and science; or of laws, customs, and progressive civilization, do not appear to come within the scope of her intention. She has done, we suppose, all that she meant to do; and there is much of entertainment and information in her volumes. Her task will increase in difficulty as she approaches the times in which we live; but it is one of exceeding interest, and will almost repay itself. With regard to some of our sovereigns we are promised disclosures which have never yet been made. We shall be happy to see them, but on this point we beg to offer one suggestion-that the field of history has been so often ploughed, that whatever of a novel nature is turned up within it, should be scrupulously examined before it is pronounced to be of value.

Art. III. 1. The American Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter. New York, June, 1840.

2. The National Anti-Slavery Standard. New York, June, 1840.

THE

HE anti-slavery cause is daily becoming more important and interesting. The true seed was sown by Granville Sharpe, when he banished slavery from England. Its growth, however, was obstructed, and the movement of Clarkson and Wilberforce was only against the slave-trade. But the alliance between the slave-trade and slavery is so natural, that the difficulty with Clarkson and Wilberforce, at first, was to avoid seeming to aim at both whilst they had in view but one. The slave-trade advocates of that time were not slow to take advantage of this; and so powerfully did they use it in affecting the public mind, already vitiated as to every thing pertaining to slavery itself, that these excellent men were driven, in their exigency, to defend themselves on the ground that the colonial slave system was capable of sustaining itself by the natural increase of its victims, indepen

dently of supplies from Africa. But times, and circumstances, and public opinion are greatly changed. The arguments and appeals that are now considered the most effectual to persuade the slavetraders and others who are, in any way, connected with them, to desist from their inhuman traffic, and to arouse the philanthropic to efforts for its extinction, have become identical with the arguments and appeals addressed to slaveholders, calling to them to cease from their iniquity, and to the humane everywhere to do what in them lies to bring its dominion to an end. Thus it is, that slavery and the slave-trade have become one, so far as benevolent action is concerned-and that they may be regarded as constituting together THE ANTI-SLAVERY CAUSE.

Of the increasing interest which is taken in this cause, the proofs are of the most unequivocal and cheering kind. So abundant, too, are they, that it would be superfluous, at this time of day, to enter on their enumeration; much more to dwell on them. Omitting, then, all other proofs of the growing regard that is felt for the anti-slavery cause, we shall offer but this,Thomas Clarkson, as he was sitting, fifty years ago,-alone-by the road side-meditating in silence on the miseries of the middle passage till his sympathy for its victims rose almost to agony; hesitating for a time, because of the very enormity of the wrongs that lay before him, and the power of the wrongdoers, whether he should obey what seemed to him a supernatural impulse urging him forward for their redress-but at last, with a resolution which dangers could not daunt nor difficulties divert from its object, deciding to consecrate himself, body, and mind, and spirit to the poorest, the most wretched, the most despised of the race; and the same Thomas Clarkson, as he stood a few days since in the Anti-Slavery Convention, the Patriarch of Philanthropy, counselling the sons and the daughters whom his spirit had begotten in all lands, and who had come together from the ends of the earth to do him reverence; or as he showed himself still later to congregated thousands, in whose eyes he became the observed of all observers,' although sinking under the weight of years and infirmities, and in the midst of legislators, and judges, and orators, and nobles of his own land, and the representatives of the powers and the people of other lands. Such honor shown to the great apostle of a cause--just on the eve, too, as we must suppose it probable, of his final departure from among us, is proof enough of the honor in which the cause itself is held.

The increasing interest that is felt in the anti-slavery cause is some index, at least, of its increasing importance. Although it originated in England, and looked, at first, only to the suppression of the slave-trade so far as this country was concerned in it; and although it won over parliament to its views, and laws suppressing the trade have been enacted, and the government has been

engaged for years in carrying them out in good faith; and although more than this, and even more than it ventured to hope for in the beginning (the abolition of slavery, so far as it was considered to exist in the British dependencies), has been the fruit of its riper age, yet neither is its strength exhausted by former trials, nor has it expired because nothing remains to be done. It does not, indeed, make the meat it feeds on '-but it has found it fresh in unsuspected places. It has penetrated British India, and uncovered there a system of oppression verging to slavery, for a long time scarcely known at all to exist, the sufferers under which may be numbered by thousands.

Neither has it been restricted to the limits of British jurisdiction. In France it has spoken-is still speaking-and its voice is not unheeded. Neither is it in Denmark-in Holland-in Sweden. Even Mahomedan countries have not been wholly exempt from its explorations. And its voice is ever thundering along the shores of America-over its vast plains and mighty rivers proclaiming afresh their own forgotten or despised truth, that man is endowed by his Creator with an inalienable right to life, to liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Indeed so pervasive, so comprehensive has the anti-slavery principle already become, that the cause to which it has given life may now justly be regarded as the combined movement of the Christianized humanity of all countries against slavery, the most cruel and brutal foe of the race wherever it is to be found. That humanity will finally prove victorious in the conflict we entertain no more doubt, than we do of the progress of truth and the ultimate reign of righteousness on the earth. Certain, however, as we regard the victory to be, we do not say, that it may not be retarded by wild and unworthy measures, or its glory sullied by the pride and the ambition or the errors of some of the host. Should this prove to be the case, we should not find it an easy task from our hearts to forgive those who, premonished that it may 'so turn out, have yet failed to do all that can be done to ward off the danger. We believe that such danger is now impending over us, and that, too, at one of the most interesting and important points in the whole movement. We allude to America. And it has been with a view chiefly to point out this danger, in order that it may be wholly guarded against, or made as innocuous as possible, that we have addressed ourselves to this article.

Before entering on the causes which seem to have brought the abolitionists of America into their present posture, it may be well first to apprise our readers what that posture is. It has been evident, at least for the last two years, if not longer, that very opposite views were beginning to be taken by different portions of our American friends-not as to the sinfulness of slaveholding, nor as to the duty of the master's immediately ceasing from it, for

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on these points it is believed they are fully agreed-but as to other doctrines leading to changes of serious moment in the religious, social, and political condition of the country. The party espousing these changes professes to consider them, in part, at least, as properly connected with the anti-slavery cause-as necessary to its complete success; and, therefore, insists that they should be carried, pari passu, along with it. The other party is made up of those who are wholly opposed to the reforms alluded to, and of such as, looking on the reforms themselves, in whole or in part not unfavorably, yet think it inexpedient, if not unfair, to connect them with the anti-slavery movement, against the wishes of members who contemplated no such connexion when they engaged in it. One of these reforms-well enough known in America, and, we suppose by this time in England too, when described as the woman's rights question,' was brought up in the Central (the American Anti-Slavery) Society, and pressed to a decision at its annual meeting in May, 1839. The decision was favorable to the reform party-the women themselves also voting on the question. From that time it became clear to those who gave much attention to the case, that the differences between the parties had become so irreconcilable that a separation of the American Society (like that which had already taken place, mainly on the same ground, in the Massachusetts Society) was advisable, if not absolutely necessary for the further advancement of the anti-slavery cause. Mutual distrust, it was evident, had supplanted mutual confidence. The reformers objected against their opponents, that their views were lownarrow-contracted-and that they were deficient in thoroughness as abolitionists; whilst they themselves, on the other hand, were not without being suspected of selfish or ambitious aims, and of wishing to make the whole anti-slavery movement subsidiary to other projects of reform, from the bare contemplation of which, however well intended by the projectors, sober and considerate men turned away with disgust and abhorrence. A separation accordingly did take place at the last annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society, held on the 12th of May, when, on the woman's rights question being again insisted on by the actual appointment of a young, unmarried woman as one of the business committee, about three hundred gentlemen, including the president of the society (Arthur Tappan, Esq.), and, we believe, all the members present (except one) of the late executive committee, withdrew, and formed THE AMERICAN AND FOREIGN ANTI-SLAVERY SOCIETY, having for its objects The entire extinction of slavery and the 'slave-trade, and the equal security and improvement of the people 'of color.'

Thus there are now two societies, each fully constituted as to