opened his career in Ireland, and Mr. Tytler's hero was first acknowledged as Richard the Second in the remote retreat of the kitchen of Donald Lord of the Isles.

It is the same story, traceable to the same love of the romantic, that we find decorating the outskirts of the history of every nation on earth. When learned men range themselves on the side of popular credulity, it generally arises from the desire to display ingenuity in defence of error, and it may even be, as in the case of Mr. Tytler, that their own arguments have produced the confidence of conviction. We have examined Mr. Tytler's dissertation, but not to review it. This duty has been performed to our hands by many writers, whom Mr. Tytler's theory has stimulated to controversy-the chief of whom are Mr. Amyot, Sir James Mackintosh, and Mr. Riddell. After the dissertations of these gentlemen, it is impossible to resist the conviction, that the asserted Richard who appeared in Scotland, was a scullion or under-servant, named Thomas Warde of Trumpington; and while there seems enough of mystery to warrant a novelist in offering the public a work of imagination, with an exiled Richard as its hero, there are no grounds

to justify the admission of the fable into the sober pages of genuine history.

In the fourth volume we are presented with the history of the reigns of James the Second, Third, and Fourth, during which there occurred. no events of marked or decided character, to distinguish the age in any philosophic retrospect. We have the usual amount of feudal tyranny, violations of law, and outrages on humanity, with the violent deaths of the three monarchs as the grand and crowning consummation. In narrating the history of James the Second, the historian has not the accurate Bower any longer for a guide, and the short history of Major can form only a poor and unsatisfactory substitute. At the commencement of the reign of James the Third, the track of history is cleared by four original historians-Lesley, Ferrerius, (the continuator of Boece,) Lindsay, and Buchanan, who seldom copy from each other; and these, joined to the more comprehensive and complete collections of public records and private correspondence, which remain to us of that age, render the duty of the historian rather that of selection and abridgment, than the industrious investigation of

obscure events. This duty has been accomplished here by Mr. Tytler with much care and skill, carrying us over ground which has no particular charms for those who have once travelled it, and bringing us down to the debateable land of Scottish history, in which the din of arms was to give place to the war of principles, and all former policy to be swept away in the great religious convulsion of the Reformation.

That event has exercised too important an influence upon the nation's destinies, to be unappreciated in its momentous interest, even by the men who have poured forth their vituperation upon its immortal authors. Its principles are too deeply interwoven with our ecclesiastical polity and our civil institutions, to be amalgamated with the rabble rout of convulsions of preceding times. They who effected it worked under the influence of a spirit too noble to be classed with the demagogues and revolution propagandists, whose atrocities have made their complaints of undoubted wrongs odious to the world. The Reformation, in truth, is the great era in the history of nations. It speaks to the living, of examples of integrity and freedom; of the heroic courage of patient endurance, the ex

alted devotion, the stainless honour, the pure and unsullied faith, which, in times of violent transition, when old feelings passed away, and ancient institutions crumbled into dust, guided to a happy issue the grand movement for popular regeneration. Brute force was reduced to silence, the law's supremacy asserted, gentleness infused into power; and by raising serfs to freemen, the convulsion which shook temples and thrones, harmonized the antagonistic conditions of life, and generated that national character, whose moral influence has given a proud supremacy to Scotland, and made her a proverb of public virtue to the world.

The old mummeries of the Papal religion vanished in an hour. But the terrible retaliation by which the guilty violence of its ministers was punished-the ruin which overtook their misbegotten wealth-by riot and waste rendered a curse to themselves-are not the prominent features of that portentous change. A religious empire, fortified with the sacred associations of an undisturbed reign of a thousand years, was put at the world's bar, to stand trial for its accumulated violations of the dearest rights of mankind. Its lofty prerogatives died away un

mourned; and its position was to be maintained, not by the argument from authority and prescription, but the argument from the Bible and from reason, against a new faith, which had no gorgeous ceremonial to recommend it, and no pliant principles of morality, congenial to an ignorant and licentious generation. From one country to another the flame of rebellion spread, and wherever the long pent-up feelings of contempt and hate found a leader to direct them, the Papal power had all its vast ambition, and all its cruel designs closed with ignominious defeat. The sudden paralysis which overtook it, displayed the universal rottenness of its unblessed dominion-the small hold it had upon the affections of the world, and the extent of its delusion as to its own power.

In speaking of the times of the Reformation and the following century and a half, no garrulity is wearisome. Open the history of the world for a chapter of more exalted virtue and loftier patriotism than that displayed by the Scottish peasantry, in their gallant struggle with the infatuated Stuarts-from the fall of Popery to the Revolution! Examples of heroic suffering, worthy of the purest ages of the early Republics,