all due reverence, the letter of John was presented, translated by an interpreter, and found to contain, on certain conditions of general support and help for private vengeance, an offer to hold the English crown as the Emir's vassal, and a promise to embrace the Mohammedan faith. The Emir showed no emotion in listening to it; but at its close quietly put a number of what seem to have been very practical questions to the envoys, concerning the strength and population of England, and the character and prospects of John; and then, with unmeaning expressions of friendship, dismissed the embassy. But as they retired, he called back Robert of London, and, as that sober clergyman assured his friend Mathew of Paris, adjured him, by his respect for the Christian faith,' to say what kind of man his master was. Robert could not resist the appeal: he said he was a tyrant, and would soon be deposed by his subjects. Nothing more was heard of the Emir. The next that is heard of Jobn, shows him, so difficult his strait, and himself so impotent and helpless, stretching out his hands to those very subjects, and imploring succour from the general body of the people. He appealed to them on the ground of the invasion mustering on the shores of France. And a man of more decent courage, though with the consciousness of equal unpopularity and guilt, would have dared to make the appeal more confidently. The national spirit had not failed him yet, hated and distrusted as he was. It had lately helped him to chastise the Scots; it would have supported him, had he not cravenly slunk away from his challenge to the Church; it had subdued the savage inroads of the Welsh; and, by the promptitude of its suppression of the quarrels of the native chiefs and revolted English nobles in Ireland, it had shed the one solitary gleam of light that hovers round his miserable government. Twenty of the native princes were conciliated; the refractory barons were silenced, and the most powerful driven from the country; the province within the English pale was divided into counties; the laws of England were introduced among the settlers; sheriffs and other officers were appointed; and the same monies were ordered to pass with equal value in both countries. Nor did this national spirit now timorously answer to the timorous appeal of John. As the news arrived from France,-that the pope had promised Philip not only the English crown, but the entire remission of his sins, if he drove John from the throne; and that the French king, bent upon the enterprise, had already col lected a large army in Normandy, and was ready with a fleet of seventeen hundred. vessels, there was not a man capable of bearing arms in England who did not, in obedience to the royal summons, march to the coasts of Kent and Sussex; and there was not a ship capable of carrying six horses that was not brought into Portsmouth harbour. It was calculated at this time that upwards of sixty thousand men had rallied under the standard of John. 'Sufficient,' exclaims the old chronicler, to have defied all the powers of Europe, had they been animated with love for their sovereign.' It mattered less that they should be animated with love for their sovereign, than with love for their country. This they had. This, John did not dare to trust. He had his last remaining chance within his grasp, and let it meanly go.. By this time, Innocent knew his whole dastardly character. With a more settled secret reliance on that, than on the preparations of Philip, he now sent his confidential minister, the Sub-deacon Pandulph, to terrify him to a compromise before the war should begin. Pandulph joined John at Dover. It was three days within the Feast of Ascension; and one Peter the Hermit had predicted that on the Feast of Ascension, John should have ceased to reign. Working with this and other agencies on the despicable fears and suspicions of the cowardly prince, the wily Pandulph procured his signature to an instrument which he had before contemptuously rejected, and which was made known the following day. It admitted Langton to the archbishopric of Canterbury; it restored to their lands and offices all exiles, lay and clerical; it liberated whoever had been imprisoned in the course of the five years' quarrel; it reversed all outlawries against. churchmen, and gave bonds that the clergy should be no longer subject to such judgments; it engaged to make full restitution for monies unlawfully seized and injuries wantonly inflicted, in the course of the struggle with ecclesiastical authority; and, these conditions faithfully complied with, it provided for the revokement of the sentences of Interdict and Excommunication, and for the return of the exiled bishops to their allegiance. Onthe day this instrument was made public, with the king's signature, and with those of Salisbury, Boulogne, Warrenne, and Ferrers, the English fleet was on its way back to harbour, after having captured a squadron at the mouth of the Seine, destroyed the ships in the harbour of Fecamp, swept the whole coast of Normandy, and burnt Dieppe to the ground. More than this. The English standard now floated over Barham Downs, with more than sixty thousand men in arms to defend it. Yet two days after, the 15th of May 1213 (the intervening day having been passed by John and Pandulph in solitary conference), witnessed an act of ignominy and infamy that would have remained almost incredible, even though the English fleet had been blown into shreds out of the channel, and every man that bore arms beneath the English standard had gone over to the standard of Philip. Early on that morning, in the church of the Templars at Dover, John, surrounded by several prelates, foreign mercenaries and knights, and the few barons that adhered to him, placed in the hands of Pandulph a charter, formally subscribed and executed. It was read then and there. It declared that John, king of England, having resolved, in atonement for his sins against God and the Church, to humble himself even as He who for all our sakes humbled himself unto death, then and there did, not through fear or force, but of his own free will, and with the unanimous consent of his barons (sanctified pretences must be propped by deliberate falsehoods), grant to God, to the holy apostles Peter and Paul, to pope Innocent, and to Innocent's rightful successors, the kingdom of England and the kingdom of Ireland, to be held of him and of the Roman church in fee, by the annual rent of one thousand marks, and the annual payment of Peter's pence, with reservation to himself and his heirs of the administration of justice and the rights of the crown. The instrument being read, John knelt before Pandulph as the pope's representative, and took the oath of fealty to Innocent. He took it in the words of a vassal swearing submission to his lord; and doubtless rose with a comfortable sense of gladness that so he had laid England at the feet of a foreign priest, and done his best to make every one of her children as much a slave and vassal as himself. He had even taken exquisite care to bind posterity to the imitation of his own baseness, by agreeing to the instant forfeiture of all the rights of his successors, should they attempt to contravene the doings of that infamous day. There is, nevertheless, not an English freeman living in this nineteenth century who may not trace in some degree to that day a portion of the liberty he enjoys. The first great advance to a general and equitable legal government must be said to date from Memorable were the three remaining years of the life of John, and filled with events of importance to all succeeding ages. They will be treated in another chapter. it. 277 New Books. NOTES OF A JOURNEY FROM CORNHILL, TO GRAND CAIRO, by way of Lisbon, Athens, Constantinople, and Jerusalem: performed in the Steamers of the Peninsular and Oriental Company. By Mr. M. A. TITMARSH, Author of the Irish Sketch Book, &c. P. 8vo. London: Chapman and Hall. MR. MICHAEL ANGELO TITMARSH'S style, as exemplified in the "Yellow Plush Correspondence," the "Irish Sketch Book," and certain weekly contributions, is sufficiently well known to lead all who opened the present work to expect something highly entertaining and amusing. The same sort of joyful expectation that we used to feel at the rising of the curtain to a jovial pantomime, occupied us on taking up this book; and we have not been disappointed; we have, indeed, been more than satisfied, for it contains not only vivid pictures of foreign places and people, but that quiet, agreeable, good-humoured satire on men and follies, which is all the more agreeable for being the result of good taste and good feeling. Satire, at least in our language, had, until very lately, been a coarse commodity, but we have lived to see that it may be keen and pungent when united with the utmost delicacy of expression and the greatest kindness of feeling. Mr. Titmarsh is a satirist, but then his book is far from being bitter, or, if it is so, the draught is so well commingled, that what he says of certain sherbet, "the bitterest and most delicious of draughts!" may well be applied to it. The number of pages does not exceed three hundred; it is a small book as to actual size, yet it is wonderful what a description of people and things, what humorous pictures, what innumerable remarks and allusions it contains. It is the very essence of travels, and like the subtlest distillation, is very potent in its effects. It is difficult to define wherein its charm consists-perhaps in the union of many characteristics, certainly in its being not only a book of travels, but of reflections. An excellent account of Gibraltar is given, quite equal in detail to a guide-book devoted to the subject; but we have thereto many sly glancings at the absurdities of human nature on which war is based. At Athens again, we have a very excellent view of the place as it is; with a sufficient perception of what remains of the beautiful, but with a very wholesome castigation of the affectation and cant of classic enthusiasm. At Smyrna, all the time we are receiving vivid ,notices of the place, we have the double advantage of having one of the most acute and lucid illustrations of "the Arabian Nights' Entertainments," and so generally on the art of literature. What can be better as an exposition of the charm of that production, and better express the graces of style than the following? "The beauty of that poetry is, to me, that it was never too handsome; there is no fatigue of sublimity about it." In all parts of the book the soundest taste is manifested, and the true position of Byron and his school well posited as to Shakspeare and the greater poets. Our space does not permit of giving extracts and examples; but the following happy expressions will give some idea how the book glows with fine perceptions and observant satire. "Our guide, an accomplished swindler," as a matter of course. The gentlemen at Athens he describes as “fierce but not dangerous;" and rejoices at Smyrna, "that a Londoner is no longer a spittoon for true believers." Mr. Titmarsh is not, too, without his enthusiasm, though it seems to glow more towards the living than the dead, as witness his description of the beauties of Smyrna, more especially the Fig-nymph. We apprehend but one annoyance from this book, and that is the setting in of a race of comic tourists. Now, as incapacity is more bearable in the old stereotyped phraseology, and learning may be useful when it does not endeavour to become frolicsome, we hope that Mr. Titmarsh, therefore, will register his style, as the tailors do the fashion of a paletot, and that thus we shall be saved from an epidemic of folly, for which, unfortunately, no quarantine is provided. Let him go over the whole globe after the same mode, and we will go with him joyfully; but as is said to the servants, we cannot allow any followers. We dread the next summer, or rather the following publishing season. But, however, we trust we shall then see him again and alone. POEMS. BY THOMAS HOOD. In Two Volumes. Fcp. 8vo. Edward Moxon. London : AGAIN have we in the great busy blundering world; stupid, stolid, dozing, prosing, hustling, bustling with the petty object of the day, let one of the greatest of our poets go down to the grave unappreciated, or if partially deified, wrongfully so. And this in an age ringing with indignation against other blind, wilful, stupid old ages that are gone : especially fulminating against the seventeenth as not appreciating the great one, in spite of contemporary laudations that he was or again, though it was boldly, but yet wisely prophesied that he should be "Fresh to all ages: when posterity "Shall loathe what's new, think all his prodigy, "That is not Shakespeare's, every line each verse |