more affecting or instructive scene than that in which Lord Hertford performed his final act of loyal service is not to be found. After the execution of Charles leave was given to Lord Hertford and three others to attend the funeral of their master; but they were not permitted to accompany the corpse out of town -for it must be privately conveyed to Windsor— and Church prayers at the grave were strictly forbidden. In silence and in secresy the body was deposited in its tomb. No words were uttered, no unmeaning and hollow Court ceremonial was performed, and nothing but the tears of the few true-hearted mourners consecrated the earth which was thrown over the coffin and the black pall that constituted the sole funeral decoration. Singular that the King, who suffered so much in life, and quitted it more ignominiously than any other British monarch, should have been privileged so far beyond his fellows as to receive the unbought homage of true affection at his tombto have his grave moistened with real human sorrow, and gently covered over by the hand of actual human love!

After the death of Charles, and during the exile of his son, Lord Hertford contributed liberally to the necessities of the latter, and steadily resisted every attempt made by Cromwell to wean him from his allegiance. When Charles the Second landed at Dover the old lord hastened to meet him at Canterbury, and he who had been persecuted by James and ungenerously treated by the first Charles, was among the first to pay homage to their descendant, whose disgraceful reign, happily for him, he did not live to witness. Before his death, Lord

HERTFORD CREATED DUKE OF SOMERSET.

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Hertford was created Duke of Somerset a title of which his family had been unfairly deprived in the time of Edward VI., but he did not long enjoy it. On the 24th of October, 1660, in his seventy-third year, the Duke breathed his last, and transmitted his dignities and his fortune to a child—his grandson.

The histories of the three great men whose characters we have briefly given-members of "that band of enlightened reformers who earliest expressed their sentiments on the overgrown power of the Crown, and were among the last to uphold its dignity and just prerogative" are told with simplicity and truthfulness by Lady Theresa Lewis, who states the case between the Parliament and the Crown both fairly and intelligently. Lives more instructive cannot be perused; for deep interest they are not to be surpassed, inasmuch as they contain matter that will never cease to have freshness and flavour for the English reader, and for all who would learn how constitutional liberty has been won in England, and how a practical people work their certain way to the full enjoyment of their rights. It is to be hoped that the success of the present adventure will be sufficient to induce the authoress to pay another visit to Grove-park, and to remove from a few more of the pictures the dust which time has left upon them.

July 23, 1852,

JOHN STERLING.

WEAK minds will be sorely distressed by the last production of the redoubtable Thomas Carlyle. That angry gentleman is more indignant than ever. His wrath

has got to its height. There are but two things for it. We must either scramble out of his way as fast as we can, or submit to be belaboured within an inch of our lives. Every page is a knock on the head or a thrust in the eye. Nobody escapes! Nobody escapes! Like the congregation to whom Mawworm preaches his last sermon before retiring from the stage, we are "all going to the devil," and, like Mawworm himself, Mr. Thomas Carlyle derives infinite "consolation" from that melancholy and startling fact. Such is the gist of his Life of Sterling.

We doubt whether the life would have been written at all but for the matchless opportunity it affords for the pugilistic efforts of the author. Thomas Carlyle, it is true, puts on the gloves with the ostensible and single purpose of covering the fair fame of a friend; but his foot once in the ring, his arm once fairly raised, and he thinks of nothing but punishing the foe. And what a foe! We may doubt the prudence of the undertaking, but who shall question the valour of the man who, single-handed, takes upon himself to thrash the whole world?

A memoir of John Sterling has already been written.

THE OBJECT OF THE AUTHOR.

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The reading public, which did not call for that, hardly required another almost upon its heels. Mr. Carlyle himself feels the force of the remark, for he apologises at starting for his apparent intrusion. The author of the first biography, he alleges, being a clergyman, could not allow himself that broad and comprehensive view of his subject which it behoved him to take. It was essential for him, above all things, to vindicate the Christian profession, and such first duty was altogether incompatible with that other duty of faithfully delineating the character of Sterling. Thomas Carlyle is vassal to no power but his own liberal and indulgent mind. He is free to speak of his hero as of a man, not as of "a pale, sickly shadow in torn surplice, weltering bewildered amid heaps of what you call Hebrew old clothes;" and on the first page of his book he announces his laudable intention of proving what his departed friend John Sterling was not, and of further showing clearly and truly for our edification and example-for "a true delineation of the smallest man and his scene of pilgrimage through life is capable of interesting the greatest man”—all that in life he actually was. How far Mr. Carlyle has fulfilled his promise and satisfied raised expectation we shall not fail to inform the reader before we close. the moment our business is less with the biography than with the biographer; with him on whose account, indeed, a volume will be eagerly read which otherwise could never have attracted a moment's attention.

For

The great object of the author of the Latter Day Pamphlets in this his last work seems to be-as far as we can gather it-to prove the utter impossibility of an honest man's making way in life, and the abso

lute rottenness of all existing things. The world, according to Mr. Carlyle, has never been so bad as it is. It is "overhung with falsities and foul cobwebs as world never was before; overloaded, overclouded, to the zenith and nadir of it, by incredible, uncredited traditions, solemnly sordid hypocrisies, and beggarly deliriums old and new;" it is an "untrue, unblessed world;""a world all rocking and plunging, like that old Roman one when the measure of its iniquities was full;" as "mad a world as you could wish;" "a world of rotten straw; thrashed all into powder, filling the universe and blotting out the stars and worlds." The professions of the world—the means whereby industrious men gain their daily bread-are just as corrupt. They are "built largely on speciosity instead of performance; so clogged, in this bad epoch, and defaced under such suspicions of fatal imposture, that they are hateful, not lovable to the young radical soul, scornful of gross profit, and intent on ideals and human nobleness." Of the three learned professions there is not one which does not "require you at the threshold to constitute yourself an impostor;"and of all the professions that is by far the most detestable and hopeless which finds a temporal home for "those legions of 'black dragoons,' of all varieties and purposes, who patrol with horsemeat and man's-meat this afflicted earth, so hugely to the detriment of it."

Before we venture to call in question the justice of so sweeping and fearful a condemnation, we may be pardoned for inquiring of this shameless exposer of our enumerated wounds and sores whether he has any remedy himself for the recovery of the putrescent