of doubt-and there is no such thing as condescending to be the friend of the family.

The young man who is accustomed to the refinements and the quiet elegance of good society entertains not the slightest objection to visit, relieve, counsel, comfort, and soothe the poor and distressed: this is at once felt to be a duty and a privilege. If he happen to live in a place where the wealthier orders think fit to take notice of him, which in the country is frequently the case, he has as much society as he chooses to accept. The classes, however, to which we have before alluded are not those with whom he can associate. They may respect him as their minister, may consider him a good preacher, and a sound divine, and a learned man; but he belongs to a different order, and they feel but little interest in him. He is not their friend, nor the friend of their friend; he has not the advantages nor the influence over them which are to be obtained by intimacy; they see him on Sunday, and at no other time. On the other hand, the dissenting minister is one of themselves-his associates are of their own class; they meet him here at dinner and there at tea, and he has opportunities innumerable of inculcating his sentiments-opportunities which he does not lose. Half the converts to Dissent are gained in society, not at the meeting-house; and it is not till the poison has half, and more than half, done its work, that the already schismatic is induced by his companion to go and sit under our friend Mr. So-and-so.

Now it will be very easy to say that the clergy are in truth taken out of all classes-from the nobleman who takes his honorary degree of M.A., after two years wearing of gold and purple, to the servitor who brings up the dishes to the college table; but all are educated alike, and the lowest born and lowest bred give themselves at the Universities the most magnificent airs, and impertinently call the townspeople (whose station is often far superior to that of their own parents) snobs.

The mischief, therefore, is not obviated by the son of the small farmer or the small tradesman being enabled to pursue his studies at Oxford or Cambridge, and thus to qualify himself for the ministry; for if by natural or acquired feeling the minister cannot, or if by affectation he will not, make himself at home with some particular sections of his flock, then that section must either be left "unattached," or some sectarian will step in and annex it to his own "denomination."

A plan has been adopted by the Pastoral Aid Society which has met with much opposition, but against which we have nothing to allege. It is the employment of laymen, under the direction

of the parochial clergy, to aid in building up the Church. We have already discussed this matter in our Review for July last, and shall therefore only here remark, that if the lay agents are well chosen, and with a particular reference to the classes of society we have spoken of, they might indeed be made very useful. At present they are only employed as pioneers of the clergyman among the poor, where, though doubtless they are serviceable, they are only extending the present sphere of the minister's usefulness; they might be the means of opening out an entirely new one for him.

This is a subject so important that we shall not let it drop here; we have wandered far from the novels, which suggested our remarks, but thoughts and plans crowd upon us, and we must, however reluctantly, dismiss them at least for the present, for want of space in which to discuss them.

ART. III.-The History of England under the House of Stuart, including the Commonwealth. [A.D. 1603-1688.] Part I. -James L., Charles I. Under the Superintendence of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. London: Baldwin and Co. 1840.

IT was with no small surprise that we read, for the first time, the advertisement in the daily papers, announcing the publication of the above work from the pen of Dr. Vaughan; for we were well aware, that a work, embracing the same period, and with a title not very dissimilar, was published by the same author in the year 1831, and we knew that a large supply of that work was still in the market at a very inferior price; numbers, to our knowledge, having been sold to the public at eight and nine shillings each, though published at the price of one guinea. The fact that the price of the former work is still so low is conclusive as to its reception by the public. How the Committee of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge could have been induced to adopt the work in a new form we are at a loss to determine. That the present edition will share the fate of the former we are certain; but that is the Society's affair, not ours: and as a body, acting with the money of the public, they may be able to continue the book on sale without lowering the price.

But lest our readers should imagine that the present work is

6

of a different character from the former, we copy the title page of the previous edition-" Memorials of the Stuart Dynasty, including the Constitutional and Ecclesiastical History of England, from the Decease of Queen Elizabeth to the Abdication of James II. By Robert Vaughan, Author of The Life and Opinions of Wycliffe,' in two volumes. London." As a matter of course the work has been re-modelled, and re-written, and somewhat enlarged; but the same views are enforced and the same circumstances are detailed. It could not indeed be otherwise. To publish a second edition, while the former remained unsold, would not have been a politic step for the Society: it became necessary, therefore, to adopt a new title. That the eyes of the public will not be open to the trick we cannot for one moment imagine. The circumstance will form a curious incident for some future D'Israeli, in detailing the literary history of the former half of the nineteenth century: he will recount the particulars of the reprint of a work under a new title, while the former edition remained unsold. Such a proceeding could not have been adopted by an individual publisher, much less by an author: it could only be adopted by a Society trading with the money of the public, who, if they lose on one work, make up their loss on another. The present, however, is the first instance of the kind in the literary history of our country, and we are of opinion that it will be the last; for on the one hand, we cannot bring ourselves to believe that The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge will be permitted to resort to such a proceeding in future; nor, on the other, can we imagine that any disappointed author will ever meet with another body of men ready to adopt a work rejected by the public, and to present it to the world under a new form. It would be an act of policy on the part of the Society to purchase all the remaining copies of the former edition, in order that the way might be the better prepared for the reception of the present. Having made our readers aware of the facts of the case, and having exposed the arts which have so evidently been practised for the purpose of inducing the belief that the present is an entirely new work, we shall now proceed to an examination of some of the author's statements.

One thing is very remarkable in reading histories by modern Dissenters we allude to the soft and gentle terms in which they speak of the Church of Rome, and of her members-a circumstance which must strike every one who compares the works of Calamy and Neal, the great Dissenting authorities of a former age, with those of such men as Dr. Price and Dr.

:

Vaughan. Popery is the same now as it was in the days of Calamy, and the change must therefore be sought for in the views of the Dissenters. That such a change has taken place is a fact which no reasonable man will dispute. We may select two points as sufficient evidence. Calamy and Neal always speak respectfully of the Church of England, and with abhorrence of the unscriptural principles of the Church of Rome but modern Dissenters adopt the opposite course--they speak softly of the errors of Rome, and with the greatest bitterness of the Church of England. The truth of this position may be ascertained by any one who will take the trouble to institute a comparison of the works which we have mentioned. Dr. Vaughan invariably uses the term Catholic in speaking of the Romanists, though he must know that it is altogether inapplicable, and that by so doing he is actually condemning himself and his party; since if the term can be exclusively applied to the members of the Romish Church, the Dissenters are not Catholics. Is Dr. Vaughan prepared to admit that the term does not belong to his own body? We apprehend that he is not yet by his application of it in these volumes he virtually excludes himself and all Protestants, whether Dissenters or members of the Anglican Church, from the pale of that holy Catholic Church in which we, as Churchmen, profess to believe. It is singular, that in speaking of the Church of Rome, the Dissenters invariably adopt the same terms as are used by our Whig and Radical politicians. Their conduct reminds us of a certain Whig peer who, on presenting a clergyman to a living, begged him to be on good terms with the Dissenters in his parish; yet the peer himself was careless respecting both. The Dissenters, like the noble lord, wish to be on good terms with the Papists, and to accomplish this object they can use terms which involve a compromise of the most sacred principles. The period embraced in these volumes is one of the most important in our history. It was a period when strong feelings and prejudices were called into operation. The Church of England was trampled on by a set of men of whom it is scarcely possible for ordinary readers to form an accurate estimate. Is Dr. Vaughan the proper person to treat of this period in a history for popular use, and to be employed by a Society? He or any other man has an undoubted right to put forth his own opinions on any subject on his own responsibility; but when those opinions are put forth by a Society, whose professed object is to furnish the middle and lower classes with accurate information respecting the history of their country, the public have a right to

canvass the motives of the parties by whom the work is published. Looking at Dr. Vaughan's former edition, for the present work can be viewed only as a second, we hesitate not to pronounce him to be utterly disqualified for the task which he has undertaken; nor can we avoid the conclusion, that the Society have incurred an immense weight of responsibility in sending forth a work in which so many matters connected more especially with the Anglican Church are so greatly misrepresented. The Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge would have the credit of putting forth statements that will bear the strictest investigation, and which are, in fact, strictly true; but that they have lent their sanction to assertions which cannot be proved, or that they have been deceived by Dr. Vaughan, will appear from an examination of these volumes. To enter upon all the important topics discussed by the author is not practicable; we shall therefore make our selection as a sample, giving such extracts as may enable our readers to form their own conclusions.

One of the earliest ecclesiastical topics discussed in the volumes before us is the Hampton Court conference, which, as our readers well know, was assembled for the purpose of considering those objections which the Puritans had, throughout the reign of Elizabeth, alleged against certain ceremonies retained in the Anglican Church. As soon almost as James had arrived in England, a petition was presented to him, signed by about seven hundred and fifty persons, calling for certain alterations in the Book of Common Prayer. Dr. Vaughan says, that the number of signatures was upwards of eight hundred. This, however, is a slight mistake. It was called the millenary petition, because the parties boasted that it had received the signatures of nearly a thousand clergymen ; and to this petition the Hampton Court conference owed its origin. The petitioners, it should be remarked, were beneficed clergymen in the Anglican Church-men who had hitherto conformed, at least in part, to her worship and discipline, and who had sworn that the things against which they objected, were good and lawful. Dr. Vaughan, in complaining of Barlow's account of the conference, says

"It limits the complaints of the Puritans to a few comparatively trivial particulars, and fails to convey any adequate impression of the nature of the reasoning with which the leaders among those people were always prepared to advocate those principles. A dignitary, who was present, wrote on the following day to a female relative in the country, and stated among other things that the Puritan representatives 'made much stir about the Book of Common Prayer, and subscription