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appreciations of the capabilities of humanity. Hitherto it seemed "a thing of no value;" but now its dignity, its greatness, and the design of God in reference to it are all-absorbing. This conviction constitutes its dedication to God and humanity; and the "unbounded prospect" of a ceaseless on-going, is to it a source of unfailing inspiration; it feels the hand of God actively at work inweaving divinity into the texture of its being; and seeing its own divinity in every other one, its salutation is, Brother, we are one in nature, let us bow before the Highest, that God may become one in us." Such an one has tasted of the water of life and can never die.

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It is souls such as this, with their heads in the heavens, that mediate between God and man: they are prophets to the race. They stand as channels through which the divine Spirit-Voice uttereth its inspirations in the ears of mankind: and, when through these the senses of the soul are awakened to it, the fountains of the deep break up; the Spirit-Voice finds an echo in its constitution; and in its turn it becomes an oracle for God.

Throughout all being the Spirit-Voice is one-its aim one; yet be it remembered that in its thousand-fold manifestation, the condition of the soul determines the form of its expression. It may be seen far through, somehow or other, at the bottom of hate-it is full expressed in love; it also lives covered and enshrouded beneath selfish accumulation-it appears in broad noon in acts of benevolence in despondency and hope-in repose and activityin punishment and reward this voice is; humanity in its lowest condition is not without it; it may be heard by it as but the faintest echo, but the time comes when it shall speak, and the broad heavens reverberate the sound.

There is no up-going with despair, so let us ever hope. Expressions of discontent are heard; seen, are commotions, dread upheavings on the earth: 'tis humanity-humanity labouring to be delivered. That hollow, grumbling sound which passes heavily behind the mountains is the echo of its complaint-it reaches the ear of God--and from his throne streams down light on the path of life-the angel of love in the distance beckons humanity onthe invitation embraced, it plants one foot in the Future and shall shortly bid adieu to the old world for ever.

D. H.

A HISTORY FOR YOUNG ENGLAND.*

What a pitie is it to see a proper gentleman to have such a crick in his neck that he cannot look backward. Yet no better is he who cannot see behind him the actions which long since were performed. History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or grey hairs; privileging him with the experience of age, without either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof. Yea, it not onely maketh things past, present; but inableth one to make a rationall conjecture of things to come. For this world affordeth no new accidents, but in the same sense wherein we call it a new moon; which is the old one in another shape, and yet no other than what had been formerly. Old actions return again, furbished over with some new and different circumstances.-FULler.

CHAPTER THE TENTH.

RICHARD THE FIRST, SURNAMED THE LION-HEART.

1189-1199. RICHARD, the eldest surviving son of Henry Plantagenet, held the duchy of Acquitaine and ruled it with an iron sceptre, at the time of his father's death. Fourteen days after that event, on the 20th July, 1189, he received the title of Duke of Normandy; but it was not until the day of his coronation in the palace of Westminster, on the 3rd of the following September, that the title of English King was conceded to Duke Richard.' There had however been no disposition to question his succession; and in the interim, by his appointment, his mother Eleanor had been released from her captivity and invested with the powers of Regent, which she seems to have exercised prusently. We are told by contemporary writers that she made a deries of state progresses; released prisoners unlawfully confined; pardoned offences against the crown; restrained forest severities; reversed outlawries on common fame; by proclamation ordered all freemen to swear allegiance to Duke Richard and obedience to his laws; and everywhere distributed alms, in her own name and that of her son, for the soul of the husband and father whose heart they had broken.

As the body of the old king was borne from the pleasant town of Chinon on the Loire, the Windsor of our Norman princes, to the sad old abbey of Fontevraud, their favourite place of burial,

• Continued from p. 565, Vol. II.

Earl Richard met the procession and accompanied it to the great church. As the funeral rite went on, and the knightly mourner stood by his father's body, the dead face was uncovered and blood burst from the nostrils. This miracle, which the chroniclers carefully relate, very strongly marks the feeling of the time. It was the body of the dead bleeding in the presence of its murderer. Richard shuddered; fell in prayer before the altar; and after the space of a paternoster left the church, never to return to it till borne there in the pride of manhood to a grave at his father's feet. It was he who had thrice refused to sheathe the sword he had drawn against his parent; it was he at whose bidding, when his brothers Henry and Geoffrey had made ample submission, the unnatural strife arose again. For on none of the princes had the old king's discountenance of the martial tendencies of his age fallen so heavily as on Richard. While yet in boyhood, his personal prowess was the favourite theme of the poetry of his time; and as years passed on, high above the most noted warriors of Normandy and England towered the haughty crest of the youthful Count of Poitou. With a body incapable of fatigue, and a heart inaccessible to fear, he lived but in the tournament or battle; and there was not a tilting ground in Europe he had not visited as a private adventurer, and borne off its prize of valour. The chroniclers err who ascribe his departure for the Crusades to remorse for his father's death. With the passionate spirit of enterprise that distinguished him, he had publicly taken the Cross some months before that event; which only served to confirm his resolve. The succession to the throne had brought with it no sense of duties or responsibilities. The confidential counsellors who bore tidings of his approach to claim his English crown, were charged with projects to drain the resources of England for no purpose more closely connected with its government, than the recovery of Jerusalem and the punishment of Soldan Saladin.

It has been seen that he did not receive the kingly title till he had passed through the Form of his coronation. The thoughtful reader will discover in that circumstance; in the popular measures with which Eleanor thought it prudent to grace his accession; and in the description I shall now briefly give of the coronation eeremonial itself (of which his is the most ancient preserved in formal records); ample confirmation of what has before been urged against the false impression of too many histories. These Norman princes did not, by the mere physical right of conquest, govern a conquered people. They were not serfs or slaves who

crowded the passages from the palace to the abbey of Westminster on the coronation day of Richard the First, and whose voices, though but as a matter of form, were solicited to confirm him King. They were a part of the day's dignity and power, as essential as the clergy, the abbots, and the bishops, who advanced first in the procession; as the two barons who followed with the cap of state and the golden spurs; as the earls who carried the rod and sceptre; as the three swords borne by John the king's brother, by David brother to the king of Scotland, and by William Earl of Salisbury; as the six earls and six barons, who carried on their shoulders the gorgeous accoutrements of royalty; nay, as the ponderous crown itself, which was on this day borne in the stout hands of the Earl of Albemarle. Richard came last; supported by the Bishops of Bath and Durham, under a canopy of silk stretched on four spears and held by four barons; and was received at the altar by Baldwin Archbishop of Canterbury, who administered to him the oath of the Anglo-Saxon kings. He then threw off his upper garment, put on golden sandals, was anointed in various parts of his person, and received successively from the proper officers the cap, the tunic, the dalmatic, the swords, the spurs, and the mantle. The Archbishop conducted him, thus robed, to the altar, and solemnly adjured him not to assume, even then, the royal dignity, unless prepared and resolved to observe the royal oath. On this he renewed his promise; vehement shouts from the crowded aisles of the abbey answered the Archbishop's formal appeal to the People for confirmation of this election of their Governor; aud Duke Richard, taking the crown from the altar and presenting it to the primate, Baldwin placed it on the head of King Richard the First.

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While this passed within the abbey, a horrible and disgraceful scene was in course of action outside, which, even so late as when industrious simple-hearted Speed wrote his useful Chronicle, and beyond that time, seemed quite an auspicious event, and comforting to Christianity. The coronation of Richard, he says, was 'accidentally hanselled and auspicated by the blood of many Jews (though utterly against the king's will) who, in a tumult raised by the multitude, were furiously murdered; which, though it was 'afterwards punished by the laws, might seem a presage that this lion-hearted king should be a special destroyer of the ene'mies of our Saviour.' That the murder of a Jew should have been utterly against the king's will, only proves what the power of money already was. Even a Jew might on that ground claim

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protection. On the other hand, what recommended them to the king, apart from the curse of their unbelief, made them hateful to the people. They were the bankers, the capitalists of Europe. They held exclusive traffic in the markets; with absolute, and, unless by ruffian violence, unrestricted control over the element which with labour governs the world. The impulse given to commerce by every fresh crusade, I have before pointed out; at such a time, their demands rising with the number and wants of borrowers, their profits became enormous; at such a time, superstitious excitement raging high, their religion became especially odious; and this therefore was always the aptest time for some shocking scene of persecution. Hatred of their faith, and envy of their gains, were indulged together. The present outrage began in a dispute at the abbey door, where some Jews had mingled with the crowd and pressed for admittance; it spread throughout the city; it was inflamed by a report on the following day, that the king had made glorious commencement of his reign by a general permission to kill the Jews and plunder their property; and it was not quelled until, not alone in London, but in York and several of the larger cities of the kingdom, it had been signalised by the most frightful robberies, conflagrations, and massacres. Richard seems to have been the least to blame. It was suspected that not a few of the more powerful barons had most assisted to inflame the popular passion, for a cloak to the design they had more deliberately formed of sharing among themselves the spoils of their victims, and of effectually extinguishing their debts by destroying at once the securities and the persons of their creditors. When the king deputed his justiciary, the famous warrior and lawyer Glanvil, to disperse and judge the rioters, the result of his task showed what a feeling he had had to contend with, and what power must have backed it up. Three men only were executed; and of these, one because he had stolen the goods of a Christian, and the other two because the flames they had lighted in the houses of the Jews had spread to the dwellings of Christians. Beside this indeed, Richard offered his royal protection to the Jews, and forbade any further interference with their persons or property; but it availed them little.

Meanwhile he had been busily occupied in raising money for his Crusade. His father's treasury gave him a hundred thousand marks; but he required a sum gigantic as his warlike projects, and there was but one mode of getting it together. He turned his presence chamber into a market overt, and offered everything for

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