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the queen absolutely trusted. The revenge of the clergy for their past humiliations, and the too natural tendency of an oppressed party to abuse suddenly recovered power, combined to originate the Marian persecution. The rebellions and massacres, the political scandals, the universal suffering throughout the country during Edward's minority, had created a general bitterness in all classes against the Reformers; the Catholics could appeal with justice to the apparent consequences of heretical opinions; and when the Reforming preachers themselves denounced so loudly the irreligion which had attended their success, there was little wonder that the world took them at their word, and was ready to permit the use of strong suppressive measures to keep down the unruly tendencies of uncontrolled fanatics. "But neither these nor any other feelings of English growth, could have produced the scenes which have stamped this unhappy reign with a character so frightful. The parliament which re-enacted the Lollard statutes, had refused to restore the Six Articles as being too severe; yet under the Six Articles twenty-one persons only suffered in six years; while, perhaps, not twice as many more had been executed under the earlier acts in the century and a half in which they had stood on the Statute roll. The harshness of the law confined the action of it to men who were definitely dangerous; and when the bishops' powers were given back to them, there was little anticipation of the manner in which those powers would be misused.

"And that except from some special influences they would not have been thus misused, the local character of the prosecution may be taken to prove. The storm was violent only in London, in Essex which was in the diocese of London, and in Canterbury. It raged long after the death of Gardiner; and Gardiner, though he made the beginning, ceased after the first few months to take further part in it. The Bishop of Winchester would have had a persecution, and a keen one; but the fervour of others left his lagging zeal far behind. For the first and last time the true Ultramontane spirit was dominant in England-the genuine conviction that, as the orthodox prophets and sovereigns of Israel slew the worshippers of Baal, so were Catholic rulers called upon, as their first duty, to extirpate heretics as the enemies of God and man.

"The language of the legate to the City of London shows the devout sincerity with which he held that opinion himself, Through him, and sustained by his authority, the queen held it; and by these two the ecclesiastical government of England was conducted.

44

Archbishop Parker, who knew Pole and Pole's doings well, called him Carnifex et flagellum Ecclesiae Anglicana, the hangman and the Scourge of the Church of England. His character was irreproachable; in all the virtues of the Catholic Church he walked without spot or stain; and the system to which he had sur

rendered himself had left to him of the common selfishnesses of mankind his enormous

vanity alone. But that system had extinguished also in him the human instincts, the genial emotions by which theological theories stand especially in need to be corrected. He belonged to a class of persons at all times numerous, in whom enthusiasm takes the place of understanding; who are men of an 'idea;' and unable to accept human things as they are, are passionate loyalists, passionate churchmen, passionate revolutionists, as the accidents of their age may determine. Happily for the welfare of mankind, persons so constituted rarely arrive at power; should power come to them, they use it, as Pole used it, to defeat the ends which are nearest to their hearts.

These,

"The teachers who finally converted the English nation to Protestantism were not the declaimers from the pulpit, nor the voluminous controversialists with the pen. indeed, could produce arguments which, to those who were already convinced, seemed as if they ought to produce conviction; but conviction did not follow till the fruits of the doctrine bore witness to the spirit from which it came. The evangelical teachers, caring only to be allowed to develope their own opinions, and persecute their opponents, had walked hand in hand with men who had spared neither tomb nor altar, who had stripped the lead from the church roofs, and stolen the bells from the church towers; and between them they had so outraged such plain honest minds as remained in England, that had Mary been content with mild repression, had she left the Pope to those who loved him, and had married, instead of Philip, some English lord, the mass would have retained its place, the clergy in moderate form would have resumed their old authority, and the Reformation would have waited for a century. In an evil hour, the queen listened to the unwise advisers, who told her that moderation in religion was the sin of the Laodiceans; and while the fanatics who had brought scandal on the Reforming cause, either truckled, like Shaxton, or stole abroad to wrangle over surplices and forms of prayer, the true and the good atoned with their lives for the crimes of others, and vindicated a noble cause by nobly dying for it.

"And while among the Reformers that which was most bright and excellent shone out with preternatural lustre, so were the Catholics permitted to exhibit also the preternatural features of the creed which was ex piring.

"Although Pole and Mary could have laid their hands on earl and baron, knight and gentleman, whose heresy was notorious, although, in the queen's own guard, there were many who never listened to a mass, they durst not strike where there was danger that they would be struck in return. They went out into the highways and hedges; they

gathered up the lame, the halt, and the blind; they took the weaver from his loom, the carpenter from his workshop, the husbandman from his plough; they laid hands on maidens and boys who had never heard of any other religion than that which they were called on to abjure;' old men tottering into the grave; and children whose lips could but just lisp the articles of their creed; and of these they made their burnt-offerings; with these they crowded their prisons, and when filth and famine killed them, they flung them out to rot. How long England would have endured the repetition of the horrid spectacles is hard to say. The persecution lasted three years, and in that time something less than 300 persons were burnt at the stake. By imprisonment,' said Lord Burleigh, by torment, by fainine, by fire, almost the number of 400 were,' in their various ways, 'lamentably destroyed.'

They

"Yet, as I have already said, interference was impossible except by armed force. The country knew from the first that by the course of nature the period of cruelty must be a brief one; it knew that a successful rebellion is at best a calamity; and the bravest and wisest men would not injure an illustrious cause by conduct less than worthy of it, so long as endurance was possible. had saved Elizabeth's life and Elizabeth's rights; and Elizabeth, when her time came, would deliver her subjects. The Catholics, therefore, were permitted to continue their cruelties till the cup of iniquity was full; till they had taught the educated laity of England to regard them with horror; and until the Romanist superstition had died, amidst the execrations of the people, of its

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Some will say that Pole is hardly treated here, and elsewhere in these volumes. If Mr. Froude's statements respecting him can be refuted, Englishmen may recover that estimate of him which they have derived from the older historians. But I cannot feel that the character is inconsistent with itself, or that Mr. Froude is wrong in giving, as he certainly does, the preference to Gardiner as being more of an English statesman, and not a worse Churchman. I should be more inclined to dispute Mr. Froude's judgment of Paget. That he should feel a real respect for a man who was not only keen-sighted, and in the main just, but who anticipated the modern opinions respecting persecution, is not

wonderful. Mr. Froude has earned a right to express a little over-sympathy with a Latitudinarian, by his cordial appreciation of men of an opposite type of character. But I cannot discover that the Pagets, the Halifaxes, and the trimmers of the sixteenth or the seventeenth centuries, really did anything to secure that their convictions-if convictions they are to be called-should be the inheritance of the ages that were to succeed them. They were wise for themselves. They scorned much that was worthy of scorn, but they could not make their scorn effective for the cure of it. They despised persecutors; they did not seriously curse persecution. When a man was disagreeably pertinacious in his opinions, they were so tolerant of others that they found it quite justifiable to be intolerant of him. They thought it very absurd to kill for a faith, but they thought it quite as absurd to die for one. And this alone has made persecution impossible in any country or any age, this only will make it impossible in all countries and in all ages: that it has been established by a series of demonstrations, some of which Mr. Froude has beautifully recorded, that he who kills for a faith must be weak, that he who dies for a faith must be strong.1

1 Do I mean to endorse the pious fraud that the persecutor always fails of his immediate object, and strengthens the cause which he desires to crush? Certainly not. The impotency of his material force in the spiritual battle is established by other evidence than that His success is his defeat. He cannot deprive his victims of their faith. Unless he is saved by becoming a sufferer, he loses his own. Unless his country is saved by similar suffering, it ceases to believe when it is reduced into acquiescence. This is the persecutor's curse; thus the divine law is vindicated. I do not say that the remark can be applied strictly to any persecutions except those which Christians have set on foot against each other and against infidels. If the Cross is not the sign and the power of conquest, there is no manifest direct contradiction in trying to conquer for a faith by inflicting punishment instead of bearing it.

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THE ARTISAN'S SATURDAY NIGHT.

BY PERCY GREG.

THOSE Who have read the "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater"-and few of us have not-will recollect in the earlier part of that remarkable volume the author's description of the manner in which he was wont to spend "an opium evening" in his youth. Under the peculiar influence exerted by that marvellous drug, in a frame of mind disposed to quiet contemplation and sentimental entertainment, but wholly averse from laborious thought or keen excitement, he was wont to seek amusement and interest in a stroll among the unfashionable marts of London: to watch the working man in his commercial dealings, the working woman in her humble round of weekly shopping; to hear their talk and gather their thoughts upon their lot in life, upon the things and persons that surround them, during the few gas-light hours in which it is their practice to purchase wherewithal to feed and clothe and warm themselves and their children, as best they may, during the seven days that are to follow. And such a walk,-though it lie not exactly through neighbourhoods as quiet and pleasant as Kensington Gardens, or streets and squares as fair to look upon as those of Belgravia and Mayfair; though the localities through which it may lead us are not always clean, and are too often both unsightly and unsavoury, offending our senses in no trivial degree, yet has its picturesque and interesting aspect. Humanity cannot well fail of picturesque effect, wherever it has to wage a hard and earnest struggle, however ugly and illbuilt the dwellings it haunts, however squalid the rags which are its only uniform, in the Battle of Life.

The crowded market in a by-way, lighted by flaring jets of gas in double rows, and crammed with purchasers so closely clustered together that it would

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seem hardly possible to reach the stalls at its further end in time to effect a purchase the little shops which are making an effort at unusual display in order to attract purchasers who are not likely to scrutinize very closely the texture of that showy dress which is marked at a figure so surprisingly low, and who will be too hurried to notice that yonder cheap and elegant" coat and vest are got up to sell and not to wear ;—the shopkeepers and stallkeepers who stand at their doors or at the side of their handcarts, keeping up a continual confused bawl, which, if attentively analysed, seems to run-"Only a penny, gentlemen, only a penny! no better in London, marm, twopence half-penny a pound-only twopence ha'penny-fine bacon-now then! buy! buy! buy!"and the eager, hurried throng of jostling purchasers, glancing at everything, coveting everything, buying at last that which is most pressed upon them; with here and there some quiet knowing ones among them, who have set their hearts on some special adornment for the wife's bonnet, or some new delicacy for the husband's Sunday dinner, and are not to be tempted aside by the noisy offers which beset them on all hands-all these things compose a scene which is worth notice, and which, at first sight, is amusing and not unpleasing to behold.

If, however, we walk in among the crowd of sellers and buyers, and look a little more closely than do the latter at the articles offered to their selection; above all, if we do so not when noise and business have reached their highest point, but before the thickest press has commenced, and before, at this season, the daylight has departed from those huge screens of joints of unwholesomelooking meat which veil one shop, and the piles of withered peas which are heaped on the rude counter of another,

we shall presently obtain a glimpse of the underside of the matter which is more instructive than agreeable. We shall then see at what disadvantage stands the shopping which is done by gaslight, amid the confusion of incessant noise and the hurry of impatient customers. That beef, for instance, is not such as a good housewife would think of buying; much of the bacon yonder is of a kind that Do-the-boys Hall would be ashamed of; and the smell of the mackerel exposed on the fish-stall in the corner is so objectionable, that it makes itself felt even amid the innumerable odours of this unsavoury place, and compels us to form a decided opinion as to the fitness of the fishmonger's wares for human food. Those shoes, too, look very much as if they were the unsaleable refuse of some more fashionable locality-especially those dedicated to the "ladies." Of those which seem fit for working men, the more serviceable were possibly bought from some government establishment as "old stores," at a fourth of the price that will to-night be asked for them. And so on throughout. Everything-except, of course, the prices-is third-rate at best, and often merely worthless. The customers must go home ill-shod, ill-fed, unfitly clothed, and must dine to-morrow on meat decidedly "high," and fish unmistakeably odorous; and all this not because they cannot afford to pay for proper food and clothing, but because all their purchases are made at once, by gaslight, in a crowd and in a hurry; because they are in the hands of itinerant stallkeepers, and shopkeepers of scarcely higher character; and because too many of them come to their purchases not from home, but from the public-house, with heads not of the clearest, and with pockets a little less heavy than they were three or four hours ago.

To many of the small dealers in such localities Saturday night is worth as much as the rest of the week altogether; many of them take more between six and twelve on Saturday night than between Monday morning and Saturday afternoon. Here is a baker doing a

more regular daily business than his neighbours, who tells us that his receipts during those six hours are equal to those of any other three days in the week. And outside the baker's door is a man with a small hand-cart, on which are piles of starved cherries, sour apples, and half-ripe gooseberries. He never comes there except on Saturday night, and he pays the baker four shillings a week for leave to stand there on the little strip of pavement which, as private property, is exempt from clearance by the police. He can afford to pay out of six hours' profit on his wretched stock a rent of four shillings for the square yard of ground he stands on. There are plenty of lads and lasses released to-night from their week's toil with a few shillings in their pockets and a taste for fruit rather comprehensive than choice, who will amply remunerate him for his outlay. Next to his stands the barrow of a woman who sells penny bottles of something which she calls ginger-beer, but to which I should hesitate to assign a name. She stands there every day; but she, too, would have a poor living of it were it not for Saturday night, when the man who has seventeen or twenty shillings in his pocket thinks less of a penny than he will do by Thursday or Friday next. And those immense heaps of peas which on a summer Saturday night are piled over half the green-grocer's disposable space, would hardly find purchasers on any other evening. One evening of business at high profits pays the dealer in the poor man's market for a week of slack trade and scanty gains. From six hours' profits does he get his living, and those profits must come from the scanty resources of families in which the breadwinner earns from fifteen to thirty-five shillings a week.

Very different is the case of the westend; very striking the contrast between Saturday night in western shops and in Whitechapel markets, between the Saturday of the rich and the Saturday of the poor.

Were this only one of the manifold instances in which by mere force of neighbourhood the distinctions of rank

and fortune are so painfully illustrated in all great cities, it would hardly be worth while to notice it. It is a profitless task to cite instances of the luxury of the affluent here brought so very close to the destitution of the indigent; it is invidious to remind the wealthy of the near proximity of want and hunger; it is much worse than useless to hold up before the eyes of the pauper the envied enjoyments of the millionaire. These things are part of an order of society which I leave it to casuists to defend, and to utopists to dream of abolishing. But when the differences we discern are not the necessary consequences of existing social conditions, where the poor man suffers under disadvantages not essential but incidental; under evils not inherent in poverty, but the fruit of bad arrangements, where the evils of his lot are aggravated, not by the law of nature, but by the mismanagement of men; above all, where the interests of the working man are sacrificed not to the pride or profit of others, but to the tyranny of a custom which, if once natural or reasonable, is now simply mischievous; or when he suffers under the effects of his own vice, or weakness, or improvidence-it is possible that something may be done towards a remedy by merely calling attention to the existence of an evil, and to the sources from which it springs.

The shop of the silversmith, or the perfumer, or the fashionable milliner, is no more crowded on the last day of the week than on any other. There are no more carriages in Regent-street, no additional crowd on its pavements; Bondstreet is not fuller than on the Monday. You could not tell by the appearance of Oxford-street that it was not Tuesday or Thursday. Swan and Edgar's presents no scene of extraordinary bustle; Savory and Moore are no busier than usual; nor are Fortnum and Mason compelled to keep open till midnight. There is a day's work to be done, not a week's. The lady customers have not come to lay in provisions for a week, as if they were about to stand a siege. They do not come down in anxious

haste to pay the little account which has been standing over for three days because they had not money to pay it till their week's income should have been received. They are not obliged to postpone their shopping till late in the evening because their husbands could not get paid as early as usual. They are not in a hurry to make their purchases and get rid of their cash lest their lords, having an idle day to-morrow, should squander the week's income at the club or at Greenwich. All days are alike to them; and but for the impending services of the morrow they would have nothing to remind them that this is the seventh day of the week and not the second. This is not so with the poor busy women, with haggard faces, and anxious hurried steps, who crowd around the stalls in the New Cut, lighted by flaring jets of gas, about the hour at which the West-End remembers that it is time to dress for dinner. That eager dame must needs make her purchases to-night to keep her family in food and out of rags for a week; knowing full well, poor soul, that if she postpone her marketings she has small chance of keeping her money by her till the hour when she actually needs it-so many and pressing are the demands on the poor man's purse, so completely does he live from hand to mouth. So she must buy by gaslight, and take her chance of the quality of the articles, half-spoiled meat and stale vegetables, leaky shoes, prints that will not wash, and stockings that will not wear. The uncertain light-it is in these places that one learns how bad a light is that of gas-gives her no chance of detecting flaws; the long train waiting to be served compels her to take what she can get, and be thankful. Every one is short of time; every one is in that degree of haste which proverbially makes no good speed. So she must take her goods, such as they are, and pass on, having paid for them at the rate of wholesome beef, sound leather, and firstrate calico-perhaps even more. People do say that these markets have a Saturday price; that, owing to the immense pressure of business crowded into this.

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