stately frame, and martial bearing; free and at his ease, with gracious looks and condescending gestures of salutation. So he passed through the long suite of ante-rooms, the Imperial eagle, glossy, fiery, "with plumes unruffled, and with eye unquenched," in all the glory of pinions which no flight had ever wearied, of beak and talon which no prey had yet resisted. He came forth again, with head uncovered, and hair, if it can be said of man, dishevelled; haggard and pale, looking as though in an hour he had passed through the condensation of a protracted fever; taking long strides with stooping shoulders, unobservant, unsaluting: he waited not for his carriage to come to the foot of the stairs, but rushed out into the outer court, and hurried away from apparently the scene of a discomfiture. It was the eagle dragged from his eyrie among the clefts of the rocks, "from his nest among the stars," his feathers crumpled and his eye quelled by a power till then despised.'

We are very willing to believe that the Pope expressed himself with feeling and with warmth, but our author forgets that the account which he gives of the matter is founded only on his own inflated metaphors. It is to the credit of his philanthropy that Gregory published a bull against the slave-trade. Cardinal Wiseman says, "This splendid decree has done more to put down the trade than negotiations or corvettes' (p. 460). It is too true that negotiations and corvettes have in many cases signally failed-we shall be glad if the Cardinal can prove spiritual weapons have been more successful.

But whatever may have been the result, at least the Pope did all he could. He was a sounder theologian than his successor. He resisted all attempts to induce him to define dogmatically the immaculate conception of the Virgin Mary. He knew that the doctrine was incontestably unknown to the early Church, and he hesitated to commit the seat of infallibility to the theory of development. But in no other particular does he seem to have opposed the views of the extreme Church party. In his encyclical letters he thundered against the circulation of the Scriptures; and he denounced the folly, the 'deliramentum,' of toleration with unflinching logic. Together with four other saints he canonized Alphonso Liguori, who had already been beatified by his predecessors, and thus set the seal of the Church to the most extravagant legend that has as yet been put forth in her name-a legend which confirms by the most wonderful of miracles the holiness of the Order of Jesus and the guilt of Ganganelli in dissolving it. The act of beatification bears that S. Alfonso remained at one time of his life in a trance in his room for two days, and

that on his recovery he announced that he had been officiating at the death-bed of Clement XIV., who was now absolved from the mortal sin he had committed, and was gone to paradise. This 'bilocation,* as it is called, thus saves the honour of both parties, the Pope and the order of St. Ignatius, whom hitherto it had been impossible to defend but at the expense of each other. But probably Gregory could hardly decline to complete the work of his predecessors; and further it is remarkable, as an indication of his real sentiments or of his prudence, that in the 'HistoricoEcclesiastical Dictionary,' which undoubtedly was planned and superintended by him, and the first volume of which probably had an unusual share of his attention, under the article Alfonso, no allusion is made to the miracle. A matter-of-fact list of the theological works of the saint and the dates of his celestial promotions are given, with the methodical brevity of the Army List; but care is taken not to lower the character of the work or provoke the ridicule of Protestants by the insertion of such absurdities.

Gregory was not perhaps of an elevated character; but in less troubled times his good intentions and benevolence would have made him a popular ruler. In all his difficulties he showed constancy and moral courage. His love of justice was strong. He was as little inclined to make the innocent suffer, as to let the guilty escape. In his eyes, to conspire against his government was a crime, which it was his duty to punish. By many it was reputed a merit, and in their judgment of course the prisons were full of innocent victims.' Though his habits were regular and industrious, he is said to have been indolent in business, to which he was not accustomed. He seems, from an early period of his reign, to have withdrawn himself from the secular administration and contented himself with the direction of ecclesiastical

This power of being in two places seems to have been exerted by this saint on the most ordinary occasions. He would hear confessions in his study while he was preaching in the cathedral. One of his flock called on him at sermon-time, and, to his surprise, found him at home. He confessed to him, and on leaving the confessional, which was immediately occupied by another penitent, he confessor far advanced in his sermon. went straight to the cathedral, where he found the Moreover, this power has been exercised by S. Francis di Girolamo, and by many other saints, p. 103 (Lives of Five Saints'). It is quite a common thing. And this is gravely told us by Cardinal Wiseman in the book just quoted, which was printed in the year 1846. Can the Irish Hagiology of the dark ages produce anything so extravagant?

deficient in facts and in details, more utterly meagre and barren, than could have been supposed possible, when it is remembered that the author was actually resident on the spot during the greater part of the reigns he celebrates. It may be that he writes without the aid of contemporary notes. It may be that the times were so critical for the papacy, and the subjects to be handled are so dangerous, that a man of the Cardinal's rank in the Church can scarcely treat them at all, except in the most general manner; or it may be that he knows only just enough of the feelings of the Protestant public to see danger and controversy in all he can say. Had he fearlessly and fully given utterance to his own impressions; had he told us the events of the day and the fears and the hopes they excited in the Collegio Inglese, his book would not have been without value and interest. And had he spoken of his Protestant country with less bitterness, he would have disarmed the hostile criticism he appears to dread. When we consider the aggressive position which the Cardinal assumed in this country some years ago, and which he still thinks proper to maintain by every means in his power, it is idle to appeal to his charity or love of peace. Peace, he makes us feel, is not to be purchased by fresh concessions, or by the toleration of further encroachments. Peace may be hoped for when the Roman Catholic priesthood have learned that nothing is to be got by further agitation, that toleration must be reciprocal, and that they have reached the utmost limit which in justice the English law can allow, or a Protestant people endure.

EVERYBODY is interested in the improvements affecting the industrial products of the country. It is therefore impossible lightly to regard the remarkable series of works of which the titles stand at the head of this article. They have issued from the Great Seal during the last six years, in a copious stream, which, under the direction of the Commissioners of Patents, has been drawn off in a multitude of channels, penetrating the country in all directions, and irrigating it with fertilizing information. These Commissioners were appointed under the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1852, to organize the new plan then introduced. The Lord Chancellor, the Master of the Rolls, the Attorney-General, and the Solicitor-General, are ex-officio members, and it so happens that the persons who at the present moment fill the first three of these posts-Lord Chelmsford, Sir John Romilly, and Sir Fitzroy Kelly

are the very men who are entitled to the merit of having inaugurated the amended system.

The propriety of granting patents, if questioned at all, must be questioned on the ground of expediency, not of justice. No one can deny that the man who produces anything is entitled to a property of some kind in the product. If the crude material be abstracted from what may be considered the common possession of mankind, as a pebble from the sea-shore, the labour of the lapidary gives him a special title to the polished article. It is therefore impossible to contend that when a man, by the mere exercise of his intellect, taking nothing from, but on the contrary, adding to, the common stock, compiles a book or contrives an invention, he is to have no property in what is just as much a product of his brains, as the polished pebble is of the lapidary's hands. Common honesty demands that he should be allowed to derive some benefit from his own work, and the extent of his interest is determined in this country by our system of copy and patent right.

But while the justice and expediency of a copyright in literature are recognised, prejudices still exist against patents, as if they were a remnant of the old abuse of monopolies, by which an individual obtained from the crown the right to the exclusive exercise of some particular trade. Elizabeth, 'moved thereunto by divers

good considerations,' did not hesitate to grant to Bryan Amersly the sole right to buy and provide steel within her realm; to John Spilman the power of buying linen rags and making paper; to Schets and his assignees the privilege of buying and transporting ashes and old shoes, to the manifest hurt and detriment of all other dustmen and old clothes collectors. In fact the list of commodities for which exclusive monopolies were granted by the 'iron-willed virgin Queen' is almost interminable. The sale of salt, currants, starch, leather, paper, tin, lead, iron, steel, sulphur, oils, bones, powder, and of a hundred other things, was restricted to favoured persons, who were so rapacious as to feel no scruple in raising the price of their articles 1000 per cent. and upwards. The price of salt, for instance, was raised from 16d. per bushel to 14s. or 15s. The monopolists were armed by royal authority with arbitrary power to oppress the people at their pleasure, to enter houses and search them, and to exact heavy penalties from all who interfered with their prerogative. Monopolies were in truth an excise not fixed by law, but regulated by the will of a greedy tradesman, who, having bought his right to be extortionate, was in haste to repay himself, and to get rich into the bargain.

It would be needless to dwell on the injustice and impolicy of such a mode of taxation; it is sufficient to say that this in-, tolerable evil was at length remedied in the reign of James I., by the celebrated statute abolishing the system. But even at that period, when men's minds were exasperated by their recent grievances, the prudence, the necessity of granting exclusive patents for inventions was never denied. It was conceded that, if a man devised any new manufacture, it would be taking nothing from the public if they were prohibited for fourteen years from appropriating the discovery. Accordingly by the statute of the 21st of James, power was reserved to the sovereign to grant royal letters patent, assuring to the inventor the exclusive right over his invention for that limited period, at the expiration_of which it became common property. Yet so jealously were all existing rights guarded, that a proviso has always been inserted, making the grant altogether void if it should be proved that any one had publicly used or described the invention before. Even, therefore, after a man had expended his time, his energies, and his substance in perfecting his contrivance, and had obtained a patent to protect it, his possession was not secure. Popular

fame has assigned to Richard Arkwright the merit of inventing his celebrated machinery for preparing cotton for spinning. It is not generally known that his patent was set aside because it was proved that the device was not new-and among the reasons which were held to render his claim void, one was that a description of the jenny was contained in a work of Emerson before the date of the grant.* Such is the law, and such it has been since the days of King James; and it is therefore impossible to contend that patents encroach on existing rights, when the moment this is demonstrated they die a natural death.

So far are patents from having a restrictive effect, that they either furnish the world with a new agency, or afford it the means of using an old one more economically. As the invention must be useful, or a valid patent cannot be granted, and as it must be something of which the public are ignorant, it follows that a novel and valuable addition has been made to the existing stock. Meanwhile every one is free to choose between the old method and the new; and assuredly, if the latter is not offered on such terms as make it worth while to adopt it, there will be no purchasers, when the evil immediately works its own cure. The interests of the patentee will compel him to adapt his price to his market. Checked by the competition of the former system, which up to his time served the purpose of the consumer, he must either offer a cheaper article, or, what is the same in effect, an article so superior that it can be more economically employed. If, however, he should be blind to his own interests, the public may perhaps suffer to a certain extent; but they are only kept out of what they never enjoyed, and the inventor after all cannot play the dog in the manger for a longer period than his fourteen years. Meanwhile, rivals would be stimulated to exertion in the direction pointed out by his contrivance, and would perhaps eclipse it. The persons interested in the subject have at least got a hint where before they had nothing.

Having examined the objections made against patents on the ground of the obstructive character that may be imputed to them, we proceed to describe the mode in which these grants work, and the relative effects produced by them on the patentee and the public. No better illustration could perhaps be chosen than the most famous of all patents, that of James Watt

* See the summing up of Mr. Justice BullerDavis's Patent Cases, p. 129.

for a new method of lessening the consumption of steam and fuel in fire-engines.' This title distinctly states the object of Watt's invention, and points at its real merit, about which great misapprehension exists, for Watt is often called the inventor of the steam-engine, though steam-engines were used long before his time. When his contrivance was completed, 'being perfect ly satisfied in his own mind of its value, he went to London in August, 1768, to make arrangements for taking out a patent for it.' He may be supposed to have begun by making inquiries about the prior patents which had been granted to other improvers of fire-engines. He doubtless knew well all that Savery and Newcomen had done: but he might think it necessary to ascertain if Denis Papin had gone further than people usually thought. He might feel desirous of looking at the specifications describing the fire engines patented by James Brindley, in 1758, by Henry Woodin in 1759, and the fire-engine and boiler patented by Joseph Hately on March 8, 1768the specification of which was probably enrolled only a few days before Watt's arrival in London. Patents are granted on condition that the patentee shall, within six months of the date of the grant, file a specification which exactly describes his invention. These specifications are written on skins of parchment, stitched together so as to form a long scroll, which is kept rolled up. Many specifications may be contained in the same roll, and it was a matter sometimes of great difficulty to consult them, as a given specification might be at the beginning, or in the middle, or at the end of the roll. Watt would have found that the specifications of patents were kept in three different offices: 1. The Rolls Chapel; 2. The Petty Bag; 3. The Enrolment Office. He must have searched all three to be sure that he overlooked nothing of importance. To each office he probably repaired in turn; and day after day (for searches at that time were long affairs, and there were no indexes to assist them) he would first pay his fee and then patiently wait while the clerk handed him down one by one the big rolls from the dusty shelves. Perhaps after unrolling their long columns of quaint characters he found nothing, because there was nothing to find, and he must have wondered that none of the well-paid officials were employed to make catalogues to save the waste of precious time. Money had equally to be squandered in the investigation. Copies and even notes were forbidden to be taken without an extra payment, and the evi

dence given before the Select Committee of the House of Lords in 1851 showed that a search sometimes required the services of several persons for weeks, at a cost of hundreds of pounds.

The next step was to make application for a patent. This was a process which passed through no less than nine stages and seven distinct offices, situated in different places. Indeed, the object of sending the application through one of these offices was openly stated, in the statute of 27 Hen. VIII., c. 11, to be that the clerks should not by any manner of means be defeated of any part or portion of their fees.' If the letters patent were required to extend to Scotland and Ireland, as well as to England, all the proceedings had to be gone through separately in each of the three cases. Thus the same patent may be said to have run the gauntlet of twenty-one offices. So heavy were the fees, that the cost of a patent for the United Kingdom could not be estimated at less than 350Z., while the attendant expenses of preparing the specification, &c., often doubled the amount. Under the new arrangements a patent may be obtained by application at a single office, and the fees amount only to 251.

The patent obtained, we have now to follow it into the world. Watt invented his engine with the object of effecting a great saving in the employment of steampower. And what were the terms be offered to the users of his inventions? A guarantee that the cost of the engine should not be greater than the old one, and that the users should save, at least, half the expenditure of fuel which was before required to do the same work. This was coupled with a proposal, that, if more than half the fuel should be saved, a sum should be paid proportional to the gain. Could any stretch of imagination call a right like this a tax on the public, when the inventor said, 'I save you half your expenses free of charge; if I save you more, let me share in that surplus benefit?' But though Watt and his partner offered these generous terms, it was long before they could tempt the public to accept the boon, and it was only by means of their constant aid that those who employed their engines struggled through the difficulties which ever attend the introduction of a new invention. When these were at length overcome, and the results surpassed all expectation, the troubles of the patentecs were far from ended. Their energies and purses were taxed to defeat attempts made to cheat them of their share of the savings