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Walken for and wyde,

Her and ther, in every syde,

In many a diverse londe.'

From the days of Henry III, the burning crests of the marching watch' had sent up their triumphant fires. The twilight hours of June and July witnessed the simple hospitalities of primitive London:

On the vigils of festival days, and on the same festival days after the sun setting, there were usually made bonfires in the streets, every man bestowing wood and labor toward them; the wealthier sort also, before their doors near to the said bonfire, would set out tables on the vigils, furnished with sweet bread and good drink, and on the festival days with meats and drinks plentifully, whereunto they would invite their neighbors and passengers also to sit and be merry with them in great familiarity, praising God for the benefits bestowed on them.'

Most beautiful of all-in its original simplicity so associated with the love of nature - was the custom of rising at dawn in the month of May,' and going forth, rich and poor, with one impulse, to the woods for boughs of hawthorn and laurel to deck the doorways of the street, as a joyful welcoming, amid feasting and dancing, of the sweet spring-time. Spontaneous and unconscious acknowledgment of the beauty of the Universe, as by men reared in the pathless forests, knowing Nature as a household friend that has entwined itself with their first affections; a thing of the nerves and animal spirits, yet impossible, alas! to our present analytic and jaded civilization. We, all utilitarian and prosaic, mourn in vain the loss of that direct and unreflecting pleasure which the untutored imagination felt in habitual converse with earth and sky, talking to the wayside flowers of its love, and to the fading clouds of its ambition; or that earlier freshness of eye, which, in the first pencillings of dawn that struck some lonely peak or fell into some sequestered dell, saw the Fairies retiring from their moonlight dances into the green knolls where they made their homes.

Religion. It may be doubtful whether the belief in fairies had passed away. At least they lurked in the by-corners of our poets, and existed elsewhere under a new character, degraded by the church into imps of darkness, to inspire no doubt a horror of relapse into heathenish rites. Superstition was wide and dense, and riveted with theology. Christianity in its struggle with the barbarian world had been profoundly modified. The tendency to

1The men of the watch were the voluntary police of the city.

2 May began twelve days later than now, and ended in the midst of June.

a material, sensuous faith was fatally strengthened, first by the infusion of the pagan element, then by the debasement and avarice of the clergy. To the idols of Paganism succeeded shrines, relics, masses, holy wells, awful exorcisms, saintly vigils, festivals, images of miraculous power, pilgrimages afar and penances at home. At Canterbury were skulls, chins, teeth, hands, fingers, arms, feet, shoes, legs, hair, rags, splinters from the crown of thorns, et cætera, to be adored and kissed by the innumerable pilgrims-for money. Each shrine had certificates written by the Virgin or by angels, to support the lucrative impostures. Winking statues were rife; bleeding wafers were exhibited; boys wrapped in gold foil were introduced as heavenly visions. Says a contemporary:

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The ignorant masses worship the images of stone, or of wood, or marble, or brass, or painted on the walls of churches,-not as statues or mere figures, but as if they were living, and trust more in them than in either Christ or the saints. Hence they offer them gold, silver, rings, and jewels of all kinds, and that the more may be wheedled into doing so, those who drive this trade hang medals from the neck or arms of the image, to sell, and gather the gifts they receive into heaps in conspicuous places, putting labels on them by which the names of the donors may be proclaimed. By all this a great part of the world is put past itself about these images, and led to make often distant pilgrimages, that they may visit some little figure and leave their gifts to it; and all piety, charity and duty is neglected to do this, in the belief that they have given and repented enough if they have put gold into the bag at the shrine.'

Charms and amulets were a sure guarantee against every form of disaster. The mystical virtues of the cross were the incessant theme of the monk. No happy issue of an adventure could be expected without its frequent sign. In peril or in pleasure, in sorrow and in sin, they diagrammed it by the motion of their hands. It stood as the hallowed witness which marked the boundaries between parishes. It stood at the beginning and at the end of private letters, as of public documents. It became the mark which served as the convenient signature of some unlettered baron. They knelt to it, kissed it-kissed it as a palpable and visible deity. Waxen images were potent to procure health and weal. An anxious wife writes to her husband, sick in London:

My mother vowed another image of wax of the weight of you, to our Lady of Walsingham; and she sent four nobles to the four orders of friars at Norwich to pray for you; and I have vowed to go on pilgrimage to Walsingham and St. Leonards.'

In the last human trial, these vain ceremonials were efficacious to comfort and to cheer. Testaments provided for requiems to be

said, in rich vestments especially furnished for the purpose; newly-painted images of our Lady' to be set up, with tapers ever burning; the chimes in the steeple to be repaired; the priest to have a yearly reward, or a residence, and at each meal to repeat the name of the testator, that they who hear may say, 'God have mercy on his soul'; a Latin sentence to be written ‘on the fore part of the iron about my grave,' and therewith 'the pardon which I purchased'; ten pounds 'to a priest for to go to Rome, and I will that the said priest go to the stations and say masses as is according to a pilgrim.' Henry VII engaged two thousand masses, at sixpence (!) each, to be said for the repose of his soul.

It was universally taught that innumerable evil spirits were ranging over the world, seeking the present misery and future ruin of mankind,- fallen spirits that retained the angelic capaci ties, and directed against men the energies of superhuman malice. The brave yeomen, who fronted danger in the field, quailed before the gentle Maid as a sorceress. A proclamation was issued to the soldiery to reassure them against the incantations of the girl. The Duke of Bedford wrote to the king:

All things here prospered for you till the time of the siege of Orleans, undertaken of whose advice God only knows. Since the death of my cousin of Salisbury, whom God absolve, who fell by the hand of God, as it seemeth, your people, who were assembled in great number at this siege, have received a terrible check. This has been caused in part, as we trow, by the confidence our enemies have in a disciple and limb of the Devil, called Pucelle, that used false enchantments and sorcery. The which stroke and discomfiture has not only lessened the number of your people here, but also sunk the courage of the remainder in a wonderful manner, and encouraged your enemies to assemble themselves forthwith in great numbers.'

The shrivelled arm of Richard III was attributed to witchcraft. A duchess, convicted of practicing magic against the king's life, was compelled to do penance in the streets, while two of her servants were executed. Satan with his feudatories and vassalscast out from Olympus and Asgard, outlawed by the new dynastylurked in forest and mountain, and issuing forth only after nightfall, raised the desolating tempest, sent the pestilential blast, and kept body and soul together by an illicit traffic between this world and the other. The fancy that once lay warm about the heart, now sends a chill among the roots of the hair.

So flourished, outwardly, the empire of Rome, while ideas became the occasions of superstition, and forms of ritualism dis

placed a living consciousness. Religious discourses, without judgment or spirit, were a motley mixture of gross fiction and extravagant invention. Practical religion was a very simple. affair. The one thing needful for a sinner, however scandalous his moral life, was to confess regularly, to receive the sacrament, to be absolved. If sick, or ill at ease, he might be recommended to some wonder-working image, which would bow when it was pleased, and avert its head if the present was unsatisfactory. For every mass usually bought by the dozen so many years were struck off from the penal period. The rulers of the Church, who once tamed the fiery Northern warriors by the magic of their sanctity, were sunk into luxurious indolence and vice. The popes, who once lived to remind men of the eternal laws which they ought to obey, were, almost without exception, worldly, intriguing, and immoral. Several were murderers, most were plunderers, one was poisoned by his successor, another was elected by menaces and bribes, the last died by the poison he had mingled for others who stood in the way of his greed and ambition. Prelates, cardinals, and abbots were occupied chiefly in maintaining their splendor. The friars and the secular clergy who were to live for others, not for themselves, turned their spiritual powers to account to obtain from the laity the means for their self-indulgence. The monks, who once lived in an enchanted atmosphere of piety and beneficence, were so many herds of lazy, illiterate, and licentious Epicureans, dividing their hours between the chapel, the tavern, and the brothel,- all scheming or dreaming on the eve of the judgment day! The priesthood, amenable only to spiritual judges, extend the privileges of their order till clerk was construed to mean any one who could write his name or read a sentence. A robber or an assassin had only to show that he could do either, and he was allowed what was called the 'benefit of clergy.'

Now consider that such men owned a third or a half of the land in every country of Europe, while they confined their views in life to opulence, idleness, and feasting. At the installation of the Archbishop of York, brother of the King-Maker, there were present 3,500 persons, who consumed, 104 oxen and 6 wild bulls, 1,000 sheep, 304 calves, as many hogs, 2,000 swine, 500 stags, bucks, and does, 204 kids, 22,802 wild or tame fowls, 300 quar

ters of corn, 300 tuns of ale, 100 of wine, a pipe of hippocras, 12 porpoises and seals. The Commons declared that with the revenues of the English Church the king would be able to maintain 15 earls, 1,500 knights, 6,200 squires, and 100 hospitals; each earl receiving annually 300 marks, each knight 100 marks, and the produce of four ploughed lands; each squire 40 marks, and the produce of two ploughed lands.

Was not a reformation of some sort an overwhelming necessity? So felt the people, who, if unable to comprehend an argument, were anxious for a correction of abuses. So felt the higher natures who led them, believing in justice, in righteousness, above all in truth, and caring not to live unless they lived nobly. So felt the Church-which repressed them, by entreaty, by remonstrance, by bribery, by force. The king and the peers allied themselves with the ecclesiastics. In 1400 the Statute of Heretics was passed; and William Santre, a priest, became the first English martyr. A tailor, who denied transubstantiation - accused of having said that, if it were true, there were twenty thousand gods in every cornfield in England-was next committed to the flames. A nobleman, hung on the gallows with a fire blazing at his feet, suffered the double penalty for heresy and treason. Lollardism was crushed by the weight of the establishment above, but its principles, infecting all classes, from the lowest to the highest, were working a silent revolution. The soft spring green withered away, but its roots were quick in the soil. The clergy did not dream that the storm would gather again. For a moment they were startled by a statute of Henry VII 'for the more sure and likely reformation of priests, clerks, and religious men'; but again the cloud disappeared, and again they forgot the warning. At this moment the Church, ever richer and more glittering, dazzled the eyes to the decay of its substance, like some majestic iceberg drifting southward out of the frozen North, seemingly stable as the eternal rocks, while down in the far deeps the base is dissolving and the centre of gravity is changing.

Learning.-Intellectual life disappeared with religious liberty. Learning declined, especially at Oxford. Her scholars became travelling mendicants, whose academical credentials were at times turned into ridicule and mockery by the insolence of

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