by providing a medium common to all. Freemasons, again, were a kind of nomade tribe, who journeyed on, and, like the patriarchs of old, marked their resting-places by setting up noble altars to their God; their very occupation must have rendered them conversant with religious matters, and the suspicion with which they were soon regarded, and which, in a measure, has descended to our own times, may possibly have had its origin in some heretical opinions they might be supposed to entertain and propagate. John of Gaunt, who patronised Wickliffe, patronised them. Minstrels were ever upon the stroll from abbey to abbey and from hamlet to hamlet, retailing their own adventures, or the wonders they might have heard, to the monks and villagers, who, like the Athenians, and for the same reason, were always right glad to hear some new thing,' though it should be (as it often was in the case of the monks) to their own prejudice: and mendicants by profession, often, no doubt, assuming the cowl, as they now do the sailor's jacket, rambled over a country in the spirit of Autolycus, in numbers of which we may judge from the multitudes executed in our own land after the dissolution of the monasteries, when they betook themselves to plunder for their bread. These were some of the channels through which, in former times, province communicated with province, and nation with nation; and how effectually, may be guessed even from the vocabulary of our own tongue. We have often thought that it would be a subject of curious and most interesting inquiry, to trace the history of England, political, religious, and domestic, in its language, and in its language alone. We are persuaded that it might be done, and that upon such an investigation it would be found that our intercourse with Italy has been far greater than our vulgar annals, or even our literature itself, would lead us to conclude. Though our literature bespeaks it to have been considerable, and especially in its more popular department of ballads, plays founded upon ballads, and gossips' stories, the substance of which must have circulated chiefly per ora virûm,' from mouth to mouth; as now a favourite air creeps by degrees throughout Europe. The nature of that intercourse (the arts, the conveniences, the vices introduced by it) would be discovered in the class of Italian words we have naturalized. Independently of ecclesiastical and theological terms, (which would, of course, prevail,) from Italy we derive, in a great measure, our terms of war, of book-keeping, of cookery, of gambling, the names of some of our commonest sports and pastimes, (blind man's buff, for instance,) and very many of our strongest expressions of abuse, contempt, and abhorrence-these last the dregs, perhaps, of the camp of the crusaders. Johnson Johnson, who is least happy in the etymological department of his dictionary, has not kept Italy sufficiently in sight, and has, consequently, sometimes embarrassed himself, (as in his miserable exposition of the word 'rubbish,') where an attention to this principle would have set him at ease. But we must hold our hand from a seductive subject, which we have been led incidentally to touch upon, whilst we have been endeavouring to show the communication which in ancient times subsisted between remote countries, and the facility with which opinions might be spread, and knowledge conveyed, throughout the civilized world. Thus it was, we apprehend, that many of those religious truths, which the Reformation brought out, had been already dispersed, with more or less local success, over a great part of catholic Europe; and that Luther's province was, not to call into existence the spirit which shook the popedom to its foundations, but to call it into action. Wickliffe, indeed, has been usually allowed to have been the forerunner of Huss, and Huss of Luther; but even Wickliffe seems to have been but the avowed representative of a very large portion of his countrymen, and the organ by which they spoke sentiments hitherto suppressed through dread of consequences. He neither believed in the supremacy of the pope, nor in transubstantiation, nor in the right of the clergy to monopolise the scriptures; yet so far were his doctrines from being offensive to the people, that when he was brought before the bishops, at Lambeth, they clamoured for his release-so far were his tenets from being unpopular, that persons holding them travelled from county to county, preaching them, not only in churches and churchyards, but in markets and fairs, to the great emblemishing (as it was said) of the Christian faith.' Knyghton, a contemporary historian, does not scruple to say, that you could not meet two people in the way, but one of them was a disciple of Wickliffe; and Wickliffe himself asserts that the third part of the clergy thought with him on the Lord's Supper, and would 'defende that doctrine on paine of theyr lyfe.' Nor will this be matter of surprise, when it is recollected that some centuries before Wickliffe's translation of the New Testament, Saxon versions of portions of the Gospels at least had been made, 'for the edification,' as it is expressly said, of the simple, who know only this speech.' Spirits congenial to Wickliffe were already in Bohemia, where the effect of his writings was acknowledged by the severity with which they were suppressed. The Albigenses had been denounced by canons, preached at by St. Bernard, and tortured by St. Dominic, so early as as the twelfth century. About the same period Peter Waldo lifted up his voice at Lyons, with a success that called forth the anathema of the pope ;-and the valleys of the Alps were peopled, from an age the most remote, with a race of hardy mountaineers, whose seclusion had preserved their faith from corruption, and whose protestant tenets are the subject of authentic record to this day. It is the testimony of an enemy (Raynerius) and, therefore, above suspicion, that they did not believe in modern miracles, rejected extreme unction and offerings for the dead, denied the doctrines of transubstantiation, purgatory, and the invocation of saints, and, to sum up all, regarded the church of Rome as the woman of the Revelations. It is true, that he mixes up these accusations of heresy with heavy charges against their morals; but this has ever been the artifice both of pagans and of catholics, to crush a rising sect. In the present instance, nothing is wanted to expose the futility of such charges, but to compare them with those of others no less hostile (as the learned Usher has done,) when it will be found that their testimony agreeth not together.' On the other hand, the more friendly voice of La Nobla Leyçon, a Waldensian document written about the year 1100, and the authority of which has never been questioned, enforces the law of the ten commandments, that against idols not excepted -the duty of searching the scriptures-as also of praying to the Trinity, though without a word in favour of the invocation of saints or the Virgin, and represents confession and absolution as unavailing, the power of forgiving sins, though claimed by the priest, belonging to God alone. With the history of this heroic band of brothers the public has, of late, been made familiar; but whilst the sufferings and the constancy of the original stock of the Vaudois have claimed and received the sympathy of every man who has a heart, the fate of a colony, which it sent forth to seek its fortunes in the south of Italy, has been unworthily over looked : In the year 1370,' writes the learned and able author now before us, the Vaudois, who resided in the valleys of Pragela, finding themselves straitened in their territories, sent some of their number into Italy, to look out for a convenient settlement. Having discovered in Calabria a district uncultivated and thinly peopled, the deputies bargained with the proprietors of the soil, in consequence of which a number of their brethren emigrated thither. Within a short time, the place assumed a new appearance villages rose in every direction; the hills resounded with the bleating of flocks; and the valleys were covered with corn and vines. The prosperity of the new settlers excited the envy of the neighbouring villagers, who were irritated at the distance which they preserved, and at their refusal to join with them in their revels and dissipation. The priests finding that that they received nothing from them but their tithes, which they paid regularly, according to the stipulation entered into with the proprietors; and perceiving that they practised none of the ceremonies usual at the interring of their dead, that they had no images in their chapels, did not go in pilgrimage to consecrated places, and had their children educated by foreign teachers, whom they held in great honour, began to raise the cry of heresy against the simple and inoffensive strangers. But the landlords, gratified to see their grounds so highly improved, and to receive large rents for what had formerly yielded them nothing, interposed in behalf of their tenants; and the priests, finding the value of their tithes yearly incresse, resolved, prudently, to keep silence. The colony received accessions to its numbers by the arrival of their brethren, who fled from the persecutions raised against them in Piedmont and France; it continued to flourish when the reformation dawned on Italy; and, after subsisting for nearly two centuries, it was basely and barbarously exterminated.'-p. 4. Thus do we find, that at either extremity of Italy itself, (to say nothing of other heretical countries, which were in constant communication with Italy,) bodies of men were living depositories of the true faith, more or less complete, during a period which, as the Roman catholic church would persuade us, exhibited universal concurrence in her doctrines and submission to her decrees. Meanwhile, in spite of the jealousy with which the clergy endeavoured to keep exclusive possession of the scriptures, several translations into the Italian, ill done indeed, but still indicating the latent spirit, whose workings we are examining, made their appearance in the fourteenth century, if not earlier; while that of Malermi, a monk of Camaldovi, was printed at Venice in 1471, and is said to have gone through no less than nine editions in the ensuing thirty years. Indeed, the establishment and continuance of the Inquisition, a contrivance expressly for the extinction of freedom of opinion in matters of faith, is of itself a most distinct acknowledgment, on the part of the Roman catholic church, how early there existed a formidable opposition to her dogmas; and, accordingly, when that opposition developed itself more fully after the preaching of Luther, those sanguinary tribunals were proportionally multiplied, as the legitimate and approved extinguishers of heresy. The limits of a review will not allow us to enter into details necessary to do justice to this part of our subject; sufficient, however, has been said to show, that long before the era of the reformation, commonly so called, many of the sentiments of the reformers were cherished in several places to our certain knowledge, and, probably, in still more, where the tyranny of the times has left us in ignorance of them. Dante, undoubtedly, was not speaking at random, in his assertion, (and it is worthy of attention, attention, if it were only for its very early date,) that the burning sepulchres of his heretics were far more abundantly stocked with victims than was commonly supposed : 'Qui son gli eresiarche Co' lor seguaci d'ogni setta, e molto Più, che non credi, son le tombe carche.'-Infern. ix. Thus were the doctrines which they call heresy,' ready at all times, as it were, to be slipped from the couples, and to supplant the superstitions and idolatries of the papal system, whenever, by any intrepid assailant and propitious crisis, that system could be overthrown. It is probable, however, that it would have been long before the mere force of truth could have prevailed against a fabric constructed with the worldly wisdom of the Roman catholic church; but it was cankered at heart, and its corruptions cried aloud to heaven. Here was the secret of its weakness-the lives of the clergy, both regular and secular, were disgusting multitudes, and preparing mankind to hail the day when they should be exposed and put to shame. In a history of the progress of the reformation, whether in Italy or elsewhere, the feelings of disaffection to the established forms of worship, which the sight of gross abuses occasioned, ought not to be passed over. Dr. M'Crie might have added to the interest, and indeed to the value of his volume, by more ample reference to the poets and novelists of Italy, who lived during those ages in which the papacy was filling up the measure of its iniquities. We single out this class of authors, because they afford a fair sample of the state of public opinion in the times when they lived; and because their own incidental reflections on the condition of religion and its professors, ought to have that weight which belongs to undesigned and unobtruded testimony. Of the novelists we shall not stay to say more, than that, in general, those innocent fairy tales in which they abound, and many of which our nurses still teach us, are usually made to relate to some lucky peasant or luckless prince, whilst any discreditable adventure is as sure to be saddled upon a priest or a nun. The poets will engage more of our attention, and are better worth it. Of Dante's hostility to the church of Rome, we had recently occasion to say something in our review of Mr. Todd's edition of Milton. His feelings, however, towards it were perfectly distinct from those of the parties with whom we have been hitherto dealing. These latter denounced the doctrines of the church; the poet embraced its doctrines, but execrated their abuse. Signor Rosetti, indeed, in a most elaborate, learned, and ingenious commentary on the Inferno, recently published, pro nounces |